Dynamic: Portland, Oregon (Series: Owl's Pocketwatch 2)
by nibo
Summary: Who will bring the Reckoning to their door? The Portland Hunt geared up to take out real threats, hoping to make the world safer as things seemed only to be getting wilder. They could never have imagined what they met in Eugene. Now what are they going to do?
1. Trajan

October 8, 2012

The message pinged through the forum early in the morning. Almost the entire group was still asleep, but Jack Madison suffered from insomnia. It's hard not to when you actually know what goes bump in the night and that those bumps can be deadly. Jack knew that there were two sides to every coin, and that everyone deserved a second chance. It's important to take those second chances seriously because asking for or receiving a third chance wasn't in the cards, at least not the way Jack dealt.

 _Trajan moving forward. Attack imminent. Backup needed. PDXHunt, please respond. -DDGoose324_

For more than a month, Madeline Jenns had been in and out of talks with the few hunters in Eugene, Oregon, setting up the offensive. The leader of a pack of bloodsuckers down there was planning something big, and the group to the south seemed to have an idea of when it'd happen.

Jack logged onto his computer and pulled up . Buried deep in the forum that he and the other somewhat organized members of the Portland Hunt frequented was the message. _Imminent_. It was time to call in the cavalry.

Jack thumbed ten digits into his little brick of a cell phone. Bricks didn't fall apart when a wolf ran over them. On the other end, the phone rang four times before Madeline answered.

"It's four AM, Jack."

"It's time, Jenns. Message just came through. Goose says the attack is imminent."

"That means sundown, and right now it's four AM." Exhaustion bled through the phone. "This was the first night all week that I got to bed before one."

"We'll need to get everyone gathered."

"Call back at 9."

The call disconnected. Jack stuck the phone back into his pocket and drummed his fingers on the case of his laptop. A few minutes later, he closed the computer, set an alarm for 8:30, and left a couple of apples on a plate on the back step. Jack Madison walked through his quite, near-empty house on SE Portland. He slept on the couch in the living room. There was no bed. There was no television. There were the few pieces of Goodwill furniture he'd deemed necessary, an internet connection, three bicycles, and a large array of weaponry. Portland had a no-carry law within the city limits, but Jack had bought his handgun fair-and-square in Arizona last summer. He'd carry it if he damned well pleased. The people who'd made the no-carry law had definitely never gone toe-to-toe with a bloodsucker that was well past its second chance.

Jack cleaned the gun then lay down on the couch. He tied a bandana over his eyes to keep out the sunlight that would soon flood the living room. Maybe a set of curtains would be a worthwhile investment.

* * *

Eric Hancock was the first to show up. He always was.

"So, what's the plan for this little caravan?" the man asked long before he'd swung himself from the blue and silver three-speed he rode everywhere in the city. It was a nice bike. It matched the Corolla Eric kept parked outside the city.

"Metro to the ride site, I think," Jack replied. He was busy cleaning the chain on the yellow single-speed he'd bought in April.

"Is anyone from Hillsboro coming in?"

"Not sure," Jack said and wiped grease from his leg, belatedly realizing that it'd do more harm than good to his jeans. "Hero talked about it, but I think it's all up in the air for now. What's happening to your kids for the night?"

Eric shrugged in what seemed to be an attempt at nonchalance. "Their mom's got 'em."

Jack looked up at Eric, whose wife was never terribly happy about changes in schedule.

"She thinks I've got a date."

Jack shook his head and regreased the chain. "At least imaginary you is having a good time.

The smile on Eric's face suggested that reality him was going to enjoy taking down Trajan just as much as imaginary him might enjoy a good night kiss or a late night drink at the whiskey bar.

Over the next several hours, a group formed. Nobody really talked that much about the plan. Jack's house was a pretty common meeting place since non-existent furniture left plenty of space for meetings. He also had a wide-open backyard that they often used for practicing self-defense.

Builder surveyed everyone from the kitchen. As unofficial leader, he'd called the shots when it came to deciding to help out Goose and the others in Eugene. He had narrow shoulders and no hair. Jack figured the man worked for a bike garage somewhere in Gresham, half an hour down the metro.

Jam and Cranks were on the floor, poring over a map of the University of Oregon campus.

"I think the most important thing is going to be keeping them away from the dorms," Jam said, running a dark blue, manicured fingernail across a large swath of the campus. "Whoever designed the campus had no idea what they were on about. It's a nightmare to defend." Jam was always focused on the end game.

Cranks shook his head. "If we can keep them out of the buildings, then it's not going to be a real problem." He was quiet, real quiet. His voice rarely rose above the crowd. The man had the makings of a master cartographer, though. He knew maps. He knew the strengths and weaknesses they offered. He knew how to take advantage of them. "This building over here might be a good place to funnel them into. There's only one door out and a long hallway to run everyone down."

"Sounds like a shooting range," Jack put in.

Jam and Cranks both nodded.

"It's two o'clock, Jenns," Builder yelled from the kitchen.

"Okay, everyone," Jenns called from the front yard. "Get your asses out here. We need to get to Eugene in time to meet up with Goose."

Ten people, their motley little contingent, filed out of the house and climbed onto a small flock of bicycles that ranged from Builder's twenty-year-old ten-speed to Jam's racing bike. Together, they pedaled through the only city in the country to outlaw gas-powered vehicles within the city limits. Newspapers said Portland was ahead of its time, winning the energy wars. Alternative energy companies courted the city to supply the electricity needed to run the core. Citizens had become slowly used to the change. Many had moved away after the city had banned all of the cars, but now Seattle and San Francisco both said they were looking at Portland to see whether the system would work for them.

Ten people can just fit in two average-sized sedans that live at a metro station outside city limits. Well, ten people can fit if you don't mind being just a little friendly.

The white Honda sped down the highway in silence. The blue and silver Corolla thrummed with electronica. Nobody spoke.

* * *

They arrived in Eugene an hour before the sun set. Jam and Eric parked near the university on opposite streets, just in case.

"There's an extra key on the back wheel," Jam told everyone as they converged on the largest dormitory. "Just try to take anyone you can with you if you need to get out quickly," she warned.

Jack checked the gun in the pocket of his puffy winter jacket. It was too warm for such a coat, but it offered nearly-legitimate cover for the sidearm.

Builder handed out a series of little bluetooth headsets they'd set up to a common frequency. "Take one and spread out. Jenns and I will meet Goose at the library, but I want the rest of you settled and hiding well in advance in case Trajan has some way of getting the jump on us."

Everyone took one.

Jack nestled his into his left ear. Builder's voice came clearly through the earpiece. "Get in position, everyone." There was a nice series of trees over by one of the dorms. Jack'd always been quick on his feet, so he figured being up high would offer a nice view of the area. Cranks was heading for the top of one of the dorms if he could manage to slip in the front door.

"In position," Jack said quietly into the headset. Over the next five minutes, the same assertion was echoed by the other members of his team.

The end of the afternoon wore on. Jenns and Builder met with Goose, a student of costuming and language revival at the university. They made a plan.

As seven o'clock neared, the sun sunk below the horizon. "On your guard, everyone," Jenns said into the earpiece.

"It's the witching hour," Jack replied.

"Something like that."

A scream ripped through the earpiece, and Jack yanked it from his ear. The sudden hubbub, however, had him putting it back just as quickly.

"Where'd they come from?" Jam yelled over the com. Jack couldn't see what she was talking about.

A shot was fired from the top of the dorm Cranks was sitting on.

The janitor from Hillsboro Highschool went down first. He was in the second floor of the library, and someone or something threw him from the window. The crack was audible in nine other bluetooth headsets.

* * *

Jam had left the key right where she'd said it was. Jack sat behind the wheel of her white Honda at a pull off on I-5 between Eugene and Portland. His bluetooth earpiece was likely still in the tree he'd climbed. They'd been stupid. Nobody had bothered with the Sight. They'd been saving their energies until the time was right. Through the earpiece, Jack had heard each one of the others die. He was sure only Jenns and Eric were left, and they both probably thought he was dead.

Why wasn't he? The bloodsuckers had come out of nowhere, surrounded them before anyone knew. Why'd they let him live? He hadn't been that well hidden in the tree.

At home, the apples on the back porch were gone. On the couch, a pair of identical twin girls sat quietly and watched him put things away. They sat crosslegged on two of the three couch cushions. Their black hair fell straight and smooth to their shoulders. Jack eyed them wearily. They'd never said anything before. They weren't going to start talking to him now.


	2. Aunt Candice

August 4, 2013

The letter looked amazingly official. It came in a long, white envelope from the county clerk's office in Ann Arbor. His aunt had died, the one who used to take all the kids to the lake house she rented in Minnesota during the summer. The letter attached was short but sweet.

 _Dear Eric,_

 _I know I haven't seen you in a very long time, but I've been thinking of you. There aren't many of us left anymore. I hope that you'll accept what I can give and remember me fondly. Take care of yourself. You were always meant to do great things. I'm just sad that I won't be able to see them._

 _Love,_

 _Auntie Candy_

Eric filed the letter away. The official envelope had included a deed of ownership. There were some papers to sign, but it seemed that he now owned a little house in Sellwood. He'd already called Madeline at her university an hour south in Salem and told her that he intended to use it for the other Hunters. It was time to start over. They'd both gone back to their lives. He had to think about his kids, and she was back in school, but there was a lot more that they needed to consider than just their mundane existences. Whatever had taken down their group was still in Eugene.

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and called Felix. "Meyers, I think it's time we put together a little meet and greet. You know a couple of people, right? Let's say next weekend? My wife has the kids. Grab a pen, and I'll give you the address. I've got a surprise."


	3. Trouble at the Saito Grocery

August 16, 2013

In vain, Catherine Hall reached back to pull her hair into some semblance of a ponytail and once again cursed herself for cutting it all off last year in a fit of fashion. She'd been damned stupid. Mark, her partner, wordlessly handed her the headband she'd left in the squad car the day before when she'd decided she'd had enough with looking like a fourteen-year-old on Halloween.

"Thanks," Catherine said and skimmed her hair back from her face. "Remind me to take it off before we go out. Nobody respects an officer who looks like a preteen."

Mark just laughed.

At the other end of the office, a phone rang. The receptionist, a new guy with white-blonde hair and big hands, answered it and wrote something down. "Hey, Glass! Hall! You're up. There's something wrong on 82nd. Dispatch wants someone to go check it out, and you're the only one not busy."

They gathered up their jackets and headed out the door.

Portland had spent a fortune to shift the entire force over to hybrid vehicles the year before when the city limits were shut down to gas-powered vehicles.

In the car, Catherine realized she was still wearing the headband. "Hey! You were supposed to tell me!" She yanked the hideous black and white checked thing off her head and stuffed it into the glove compartment while they waited for the light to turn green.

"Sorry, but what's on your head is rarely what I'm thinking about when we're heading out the door, Hall."

Catherine shook her head. Several piece of dark brown rage fell into her face. She swore again.

The city sped by. They were the only ones on the road able to really move more than 20 miles per hour, and the roads were relatively bare. 4:15 PM wasn't much of a time for a joy ride, even if the overcast sky made for wonderful biking weather. At the next light, they waited for a father with two young children in a box bike to cross with what must have been at least a week's worth of groceries. Mark waved. Catherine tried desperately to tuck a piece of hair behind her left ear and make it stay.

The Saito Grocery, a little Japanese import grocery on 82nd avenue, wasn't much to look at, a squat little one-storey building with few windows and an old sign that desperately needed to be repainted. Catherine was less than thrilled by whatever or whomever was crouching on the roof. "Hey, keep on eye on that, will you?" she asked Mark as she parked the car out front. She noticed several bikes in the parking lot, one had been converted into a cargo bike to be able to carry long bags along the long back rack. "Maybe run the plates on those bikes, too." Bike licensing had been contentious but deemed necessary when the city went car-free.

"Keep an eye on what?" he asked.

Catherine pointed to the roof. "There's someone up there," she said.

A shadow shifted behind the low lip of the building's roof and then disappeared.

"Why don't I head up there while you go inside and see what's going on," Mark offered.

She nodded and walked up to the front door. A little bell chimed when Catherine pushed the door open, but for a moment, the inside seemed empty. A bowl of half-eaten noodles with a fork and spoon sitting partially immersed in broth sat on the counter that ran along one side of the store. "Hello?" Catherine called. "My name is Officer Catherine Hall. I'm with the Portland Police Department. Someone called us to come out."

A tired-looking old Japanese woman walked out from the back room. She eyed Catherine warily and pointed a short, bony finger at the other woman. "Everything is fine. There's no problem. Go back."

"Can I help with anything?" Catherine tried to take a step toward the woman who simply stepped back.

"Yes!" a voice yelled from the back. Something that sounded like a heavy box fell in what must have been a storeroom. "You can help!" A young woman with dark blonde hair tied up in a tight bun and clothes that seemed more fitting for someone on a jungle adventure than an afternoon of import shopping came running from the back room, closely followed by an elderly Japanese man who looked almost as tired as the woman Catherine could only assume was his wife.

Footsteps reverberated through the ceiling. The two owners looked up. "Eh!" the man yelled. "Who's on my roof?"

The blonde woman blanched slightly, but looked over at Catherine. "Officer, we need your help."

The old man looked at the two women who were not his wife and shook his head. "No. No problem. Just go away and leave us alone." The speech seemed to wind him, and the man was left panting for air.

"Can I take a look in the back?" Catherine asked.

"No!" the owners yelled together.

"There's no problem," the wife added, still looking up at the ceiling from whence the sound of shuffling feet could be heard.

Catherine took a shot in the dark and asked, "Mr. and Mrs. Saito, who made the call?"

The Japanese couple shared a look that Catherine couldn't read at all and then turned to stare stonily at her.

"My friend," the blonde woman replied. "Felix is in the back."

As much as neither of the Saitos wanted Catherine to go back there, neither one seemed quite ready to get up from the little stools they'd perched on to catch their breath. Unhindered, she let herself through the open door to the store room. What must have once been a room full of boxes and cans was now a windowless room sporting a bed, bedside table, sink, and door with an industrial strength lock keeping it closed. Catherine guessed that the door would lead into the parking lot.

Sitting on the bed were two Japanese people, even older than the more-than-middle-aged couple in the grocery. Their dull, expressionless eyes stared blankly at the bald man in a plaid shirt and well-worn jeans who held a large hunting knife positioned against them as though they might spring into action at any moment instead of simply sitting on the faded, pansy-print duvet, waiting to turn to dust.

"Why don't you give me that knife," Catherine coaxed, one hand out and the other resting lightly on her holster. "There's nothing here that's going to hurt you."

She'd expected mania or possibly some kind of phobia for the elderly. Instead, the man looked at her quite calmly and said, "I'm just making sure they don't go anywhere," before sheathing the knife.

"I don't think they're real fast movers," Catherine said with an indulgent smile. "Are you Felix? Did you call?"

"Yes, officer." Pointing at the two elderly people, he added, "These two people are being held here against their will."

The two people continued to stare at a point in space where there was nothing. Catherine wondered whether they were blind. "Let me take care of this, sir."

Felix hesitated. For the first time since she'd entered the room, he seemed unsure. "I don't think that's a good idea." His eyes flicked back and forth between the two pajama-clad people on the bed and the cop. Catherine knew enough about body language to read his anxiety.

"Everything will be fine. I promise." She didn't want him to think that she was going to do anything to the poor old people. The Portland Police didn't always have the best reputation, but she took her job seriously. Nobody was going to get hurt if she had anything to do with it.

After another moment, he nodded warily and left her in the room.

Catherine walked over to the bed and knelt down so she was approximately chest-height to the two people. The woman seemed so old that Catherine could barely understand how she was still alive. Her skin hung loose at her neck and elbows, and her eyes were a milky white that confirmed the earlier suspicions. The man was lightly hunched with white hair that clung to the sides of his head in thin wisps. "My name is Catherine Hall. I'm a police officer," she said. "I just want to see how you're doing."

She reached first for the old man, hoping to just check the basics: mobility and pulse. Did they need immediate medical attention or could they be left alone?

On the roof, there was a little more scuffling, and then Catherine heard determined steps back toward the ladder on the side of the building that Mark must have gone up.

The old man's wrist was a dried twig in Catherine's hand, delicate as glass. She felt along the edge, searching for a pulse beneath the paper-thin skin. Slowly, the hand turned over, twisting slightly in her grasp as the old man raised equally filmy eyes to stare in her direction.

Catherine smiled up at him, hoping she seemed gentle and calm instead of uneasy as she always did around the very old.

The old man stretched his fingers. They were long and thin and two of them popped softly from lack of use. Slowly, he wrapped them around Catherine's wrist and pulled his arm from her fingers.

She noted the strength of his grip, the tenacity of his hand as she smiled and tried to pull away, his insistence as he opened his mouth and pulled her toward him. Nothing made sense. The edges of everything seemed to blur as reality ebbed away, leaving only two monsters on the bed who were staring at her with an unending hunger that Catherine somehow knew couldn't be sated. She heard herself scream, and the sound was swallowed up by the stacks of boxes that lined the walls. Nobody was going to hear. She'd die in there. She closed her eyes tightly and held her breath, trying not to cry in her last moments as the old woman placed her hands on Catherine's shoulders and squeezed hard.

When she opened her eyes, Catherine found herself sitting on a stool at the front counter. The half-bowl of noodles sat just to her left. The clouds had parted, and the sun was shining just a little. How had she gotten there?

Felix stood beside the stool. His knife was sheathed but not quite so clean-looking as it had before. "Drink some water." He handed her a metal bottle with a sticker for some high-tech company plastered on the side.

"Thanks." She took the bottle, but didn't drink anything.

The blonde woman, far less coiffed as she had been, walked out from the back. She was talking with the Saitos, keeping her voice low and fierce. Catherine couldn't pick up much of what they were saying, but everyone stopped talking as soon as Mark appeared, also from the back room.

"Just like you said, Ms. Jenns. Those two have been dead for a while. I'd say more than a year." Mark was writing something in his notebook. He turned to the two owners. "You need to have them buried or cremated. Dead bodies can't just hang around like that. We'll be back in two days to check up on you. If they're not gone by then, we're going to call in food services to do an inspection."

Catherine thought Mr. Saito looked almost relieved by the ultimatum.

Felix gave Catherine his card. He looked sad. "Things are going to be hard for a little while. If you need to talk, give me a call or write an email or something."

She took the card and pushed it into her back pocket.

Chatting at length and volume about an ex-military marksman who'd been hiding on the roof and the pair of corpses that had been rotting in the back room, Mark drove them back to the precinct. Catherine stared at the water bottle she'd forgotten to give back to Felix. What the hell had happened? She couldn't have seen what she'd thought she'd seen. Right?


	4. Psy-Phi

Early March, 2013

"Out! Get out!" his mother screamed at him, holding his cell phone in her hand. How had he been so thoughtless?

"Are you really kicking me out over this?" Justin asked, pointing at the phone. He'd never really loved Medford, but he'd also never thought he'd have to leave.

"You bet your socks I am. I told you a year ago that if you didn't shape up, you'd have to leave. This was your choice, Justin, not mine. You knew the consequences of your actions when you wrote those disgusting things."

"Can I pack a bag?" he asked, fighting desperately to keep his voice clear and level.

His mom put the phone in her purse. "I'm going to work. When I get back, you can't be here anymore."

Justin didn't trust himself to answer, so he nodded and walked down the narrow hallway to his bedroom. He'd never really thought she'd go through with it. Who actually kicks their kid out for being gay?

* * *

28 September, 2013

The Portland Public Library was one of the most beautiful buildings in the entire city. He'd say it was a beautiful city if he was feeling completely honest and actually wanting to talk to anyone. The weather report he'd pulled up on the free computer suggested that there wouldn't be any rain for the rest of the week. That meant he'd be able to sleep under one of the bridges instead of vying for an empty bed at a shelter.

His personal email pinged with messages from Apple and Meyers, who still wanted him to go sleep on a couch instead of in a shelter, but that meant living with someone else's rules. He'd had enough of that.

The maze of sites that he had to wind his way through to find was impressive at this point. Apple'd set up security protocols all over the place to protect the thing, but nobody really trusted it completely after what had happenend in Eugene.

Justin clicked on the banner ad for a line of over-sized bow ties and found himself at the login screen. He typed in his name, Interface202, and a password. There weren't a lot of new messages, but one or two caught his eye.

 _Something weird's going on downtown_. _Check out Ground Kontrol._

The message was signed by a user Justin didn't know. Then again, he didn't know a lot of people in Portland yet. After shooting a quick message to Apple about what was going on, he cleared the computer and logged off.

* * *

Ground Kontrol was a very popular gaming cafe and bar in the downtown industrial district. The whole area looked like a bunch of renovated warehouses left over from some time before the great recession. Now, they were all filled with innumerable coffee shops that doubled as after-hours bars or strip clubs. Lacking a fake ID, Justin hadn't yet tried to go wandering into any of them after nine o'clock.

"Hey!" Someone elbowed him hard enough in the chest to send the wind out of him. "Get in line, dick face!"

Justin rubbed the sore spot on his chest and eyed the line that apparently wrapped halfway around the building. "What's going on?" he asked his assailant.

The young man, probably no more than twenty years old, was dressed in a dark grey hoodie not unlike Justin's own. The only real difference was that Justin's had legitimately come from Goodwill while the other guy's only looked secondhand.

The other guy sized Justin up, seemed to decide that the scrawny little teenager in his oversized clothes probably wasn't going to steal his place in line, and pointed toward Ground Kontrol. "There's a new game inside. 'Sposed to be fucking amazing. My friend Allison hasn't stopped talking about her turn inside."

"What's it like?"

"Dunno. She just said it was 'life altering' and that I oughta get my ass in line." He brandished a half-full cup of six-dollar coffee in Justin's direction. "Been here for almost four hours now."

Justin nodded and walked around the corner of the early 20th century brick building that housed Ground Kontrol. Out front, a gaggle of reporters were yelling incoherently into foam-topped microphones about lines and record-breaking sales and the like.

The front of the overly-neon arcade was cordoned off with thick, red velvet ropes strung between gold strands like the opening night for a movie or something. The line snaked and curved and moved through the winding path amazingly slowly.

Justin looked around for a moment, then closed his eyes, reached back, and pulled his hood up over his head. When he opened his eyes again, he took a closer look at the people around him.

Normal. Everyone one of them. Not a sparkle or a glow or a speck of the supernatural in any of the people in line.

He turned toward the other side of the building where people who'd played Psi-Phi were exiting and closed his eyes almost immediately. The short-haired, Hispanic woman who'd just stumbled out of the building shone brighter than anything he'd ever seen before. Her hair, definitely dark brown without the Sight, was near-white when he looked at her again.

"Hey!" he said, walking toward her. "You okay?"

The woman had leaned back and pressed her back against the brick wall. She seemed to be waking up or something because her eyes opened and closed agonizingly slowly. She turned at the sound of Justin's voice and eventually managed to connect all the dots it took to realize someone had spoken to her. "Have you done it yet?" she asked.

"What?"

"Psy-Phi." Her voice trembled when she spoke the word as though she'd had a deeply religious experience. "There's nothing like it."

"What's the game?"

Her eyes cleared up a little, but to Justin the brilliance from whatever the game had done to her continued to glow more strongly. "It's not a game, not really." Little pieces of rock crumbled from the wall as she slid to the ground and sat. "It just makes everything so clear. It's like I know everything now. I can see why it all happened. Why was my life so complicated before?" She stared out toward the parking lot. "Nothing was really all that hard."

Justin knelt beside her, close enough to watch whatever was happening to her hair, not quite touching. "So it gets into your head? It helps you kinda make sense of stuff?"

"No, not at all. It's an RPG or something. You're walking through some woods, I guess. I don't really remember, but somehow everything makes a lot more sense now than it did before I got in there."

An alarm went off inside the building, and Justin's head snapped up to look at the handleless back door. He stood up and searched around for a way in that didn't include trying to elbow his way through the line. "Shit."

"Everything's going to be okay, you know," the woman said, looking up at him. "Don't worry."

He just shook his head. "Be careful, okay?" he said to the woman then dug into the back pocket of his jeans for a piece of paper he'd written Meyers' phone number on. Felix'd forgive him, right? The guy was basically the Hunter welcome wagon, right? "Call this number if anything weird happens." He handed her the piece of paper and headed back around to the front of the arcade.

"Get your hands off me," an old man was growling at a twenty-something security guard. "You've got no right to throw me out, son." If eyes could shoot daggers, that security guy would be so dead.

Justin used the opportunity offered by the old-timer to slide around the edge of the line and slip into the arcade. With his hood still up, he looked around the room for anything that stood out as unusual. The innocuous-looking white VR box with its impressively calligraphed "Psy-Phi" splashed across one side fit the bill. The box looked big enough to fit two or maybe three people and was surrounded by security personnel and more of those red velvet ropes. On the outside, nothing seemed particularly strange, but when Justin circled 'round, he noticed a hand-sized panel that glowed brilliantly white like the hair on the woman outside. There was no way he was going to get close enough to touch the thing, even if he wanted to.

The alarm went off again, and Justin shoved his fingers in his ears. "What the-?" He looked around for whoever had set off the despicable thing. On the landing overlooking the large room of games, he spotted the telltale shine of Felix's bald head. "Oh, of course. He touched something."

That meant that things were in hand, too. If Felix was there, others probably were too. Oh, right. That was definitely the old dude Felix had mentioned in his last email. Jeff? Probably Jeff. Good distraction, Jeff. Well done.

On his way back out the side door, Justin spied a trio of suit-wearing men in dark glasses, carrying overly-shiny cellphones. He knew that look. Apple scorned it, and it meant trouble for anyone like him. Definitely time to leave. Baldy'd have to take care of himself.


	5. Betting on Hillsboro

3 October, 2013

Headlights swept past the car as they drove down the highway at sixty miles an hour. Elise stuck her head out of the side window and howled into the moonless night. "This is fucking amazing!" she screamed over the electronica playing. The car picked up speed.

"Wanna go faster?" Maurice asked his companions. "I bet we could get this POS Toyota over eighty."

"Do it!" Tiqua yelled back, and Maurice pushed the pedal to the floor. They expected sirens and flashing lights at any moment. Who cared? It was worth every second of freedom they'd always been told they couldn't have. Sunrise wasn't long off. They'd be the last ones to stumble home to the boarded up house in Hillsboro. Nobody paid much attention to them, and that was just fine by Maurice. If nobody cared what you did, nobody bothered to stop you.

* * *

Morning was about to crack dawn as they laid down on the bare wood floors of the blacked-out living room. Elise pillowed her head on her arms and closed her eyes. She couldn't stop smiling.

"Psst." She reached out and tapped Tiqua on the shoulder. "Wanna go driving again tomorrow night?"

"You don't have any more money for gas," Tiqua pointed out, rolling her eyes in the darkness.

"We'll steal some."

"Sure. You get the money, and we'll go out again tomorrow."

Elise's smile grew as she laid back on the floor and buried her face in her arms. Being dead was awesome.

* * *

Maurice smiled what Elise figured was supposed to be his 'winning smile' at the teenager standing behind the cash register at Fred Meyer's. "I was thinking we could go for coffee or something sometime," he said.

Elise rolled her eyes. Tiqua already had a backpack stuffed full of chocolate and chips they wouldn't be able to eat, but managing to pull off stealing a few things without repercussions was its own reward.

Casually, one foot slowly in front of the other, Elise walked out the front door of the store. A long-legged, long-haired, trench coat wearing stereotype was leaning against their car.

"Been having fun?" Mr. Vampy asked.

"Sure. What's not to love?" she replied, trying her best to look unimpressed.

"Stealing Pringles and cop-baiting is high thrills, I'm sure," he drawled. "You guys up for something a little better?"

Tiqua walked up and dumped the backpack on the ground beside Elise. "Who's the Anne Rice novel?"

Elise tried not to laugh.

"How about a bet?" the guy asked.

"What kind of bet?"

Elise sighed. Tiqua'd bet anything. They were so screwed.

"You ever heard of flashing?"

Tiqua eyed up the guy's jacket. "Like...?"

"No." He heaved a long-suffering sigh. "It's a game. I'll teach you."

* * *

An hour later, they were back on the road. Sitting in the back seat, Maurice had two hundred dollars in his pocket and a pen he'd stolen from the cashier.

"There!" Tiqua yelled, pointing at a car in front of them. "Slow down. See if they flick their lights."

Elise eased up on the gas until they were rolling by at a little over fifteen mile per hour. They rolled past the little red Miata at a crawl.

"Damnit!" Maurice swore from the back and pounded his fist on the seat. "Where's the common good? Whatever happened to looking out for one another?" he yelled and gave the Miata the finger as it sped into the distance.

"Oh, look!" Tiqua pointed toward another car rolling toward them.

The forest green Subaru took its sweet time; whoever was driving the damn thing had very particular feelings about going exactly the speed limit. Elise figured that was probably pretty good news for them.

Sure enough, just as the oversized bike rack on wheels trundled past, the driver flicked the brights at them a couple of times to warn them that their lights were off.

"Perfect," Maurice said darkly.

Elise pulled hard on the wheel, spun the car in a 180 degree turn, and floored the Toyota. Rubber squealed across the pavement. "Hold tight," she said to those in the car moments before the nose of the car rammed hard into the rear bumper. The Subaru's rear lights pulsed on and off as the driver struggled to escape.

The Subaru pulled away, and Elise depressed the accelerator once more. They could start to hear the screaming from the other car as Elise's nose slid under the rear bumper of the Subaru and lifted it off the ground.

Now that the other car was stuck, Maurice launched himself out the back door of their Toyota toward the Subaru.

Tiqua raised the pistol the guy from Freddy's had given them and sent two rounds through the back window of the offending SUV.

Elise laughed. This was going to be so much fun! "Nobody gets out alive," she reminded Tiqua.

Three humans spilled out of the car, and they were armed. Even better.

One of them, a bald guy with an angry look about him stepped firmly from the driver's side and shot Tiqua square in the shoulder. For her part, Tiqua screamed with laughter and shook it off. "You wanna play, old man?" she asked and leapt on top of him with speed he could never hope to understand.

Maurice was already chasing down a younger man who moved like he had some kind of military training and was yelling back at the others, "Get yourselves out of range. Don't let them get a hand on you!"

"Thanks for that, Harold!" the guy under Tiqua yelled back. "Bit busy here."

Elise's laughter died real quick as the bald guy yelled something utterly incomprehensible and from the air around him burst a bubble of the most terrifying whatever-it-was imaginable. No thoughts remained in her mind except to get away from it, get out of it. Whatever it was, it was going to hurt them.

Tiqua's screams of fear echoed the alarms going off in Elise's brain. Together, they fled to the other side of the Toyota, cowering.

"What the hell was that?" Tiqua asked when she'd had a moment to compose herself.

"I have no idea," Elise said, but she had no more time to think about it.

"You is in the wrong place," a high-pitched, reedy voice called out toward them. "Why you want to hurt us? We not hurting you."

Together, Elise and Tiqua looked up to see a slightly bent, graying Asian woman sauntering toward them angrily.

"What's it to you, granny?" Tiqua spat at her.

The old woman didn't like that. "You shouldn't have do that," she told Tiqua calmly. "Not polite."

Elise just shook her head. Someone needed to teach grandma not to stick her nose in where it wasn't wanted.

Behind them, three more gunshots rang across the night and the bubble of fear ebbed away into the ether of whatever it'd come from. Much better.

Tiqua was gone, running after the bald guy beside the Toyota who'd made the horrid thing.

Granny slowly, deliberately shook her head at Elise. "You need learn some manner, you know. Not nice hurting people." She pulled out a large kitchen knife, the kind used for chopping vegetables in suburban family homes. She turned her hand slightly from side to side, and just like it did in the movies, a single shining star seemed to trace the edge of the blade. "I'll show you."

Elise set her feet and felt the blood she'd drunk just after sunset run hot through her body, filling her hands and arms with a strength she'd only dreamt of as a child. "Just you try."

Fast wasn't a strong enough word. Granny sprinted flat out, her feet pounding the pavement as she put her head down and ran directly into Elise. The knife in her hand slid home between Elise's third and fourth ribs, puncturing lungs she technically no longer needed. How the hell had that happened?

A shriek of delight came from the old woman as she turned, pinned Ellie's foot to the ground with her own, and plunged the knife into the side of Elsie's neck.

What little blood was left in Elsie's body leaked out through the wound in her neck, and she wrapped her hands around her throat "You piece of-" The words cut off as the overly-sharp blade slid across Elise's throat. Death, it seemed, was not as painful as she'd expected. The remaining strength in her body ebbed away. The last thing Elise felt was the surface of rough asphalt under her left shoulder as her head hit the ground.


	6. Agent Paul Craig

October 17, 2013

Paul Craig sat in his silver Audi in the overly-steep driveway that led to his house.

She didn't fit anywhere in his life, and he knew it.

The shining, smooth surfaces of the home he'd chosen for his cover had two weeks of dust resting on them when he pushed open the front door of the home he wasn't even completely sure he liked having. His little apartment in Salem was much nicer. It had curtains and a sofa from the second-hand store. This one was full of chrome, glass, and the nameless technology his Convention came with. He felt like something out of a bad romance novel when he stayed there: _Tall, dark, and mysterious, Agent Paul Craig arrived home, realizing how empty it seemed. Isn't that always the way?_

Another text pinged into the burner cell he kept in his pocket.

 _Welcome home._

Nobody should have been able to bug his house, but somehow she must've. They'd have to have a talk about that. Boundaries were important, especially when Big Brother was really big.

Paul pocketed the cell phone and dropped his overnight duffel in the master bedroom.

By the time he was out of the shower, clean for the first time in three days, he had two more texts and four emails. Sometimes being highly connected was overrated. Okay, maybe not, but it could get really inconvenient when everything short of his thoughts was being watched. Actually, they might be watching his thoughts, too. Paul would've had a drink if there had been anything stronger than English Breakfast in his house.

He changed into a pair of dark blue track pants and a Portland Marathon t-shirt. He needed to get out, even if he had just showered. The emails and texts would wait until he could deal with them.

* * *

Portland was a city of hills, not exactly the best place to ban all gas-powered vehicles. As Paul's legs turned over, his feet pounding the pavement, he saw the occasional electric scooter chug up the steep West Hills. The drivers waved and smiled from the safety of their raincoats and then passed him by.

Five minutes passed, ten, and Paul could see the crest of the hill coming up. Over his years in Portland, he'd found the top of that hill just the perfect distance from his house for a little clarity of mind and an escape from the pin cameras that filled his living room.

A young, caucasian woman with waist-length, honey-brown dreadlocks and thick-rimmed black glasses was sitting at the top of the hill underneath an evergreen tree. She appeared to be his polar opposite, hipster to his typical suit. Ok, well, right now he was just sweaty.

"Took you long enough." In the ever-present drizzle of Portland's fall, she looked like the quintessential local. At least, she would if she didn't have that USB tattoo behind her left ear. Paul couldn't see it, but he knew it was there. He also knew it wasn't actually a tattoo.

"What do you want, Apple?" he asked, but the annoyance he'd been aiming for somehow didn't make it out. He took long swallows from the bottle of water she'd handed him. She really didn't fit anywhere in his life. This was getting dangerous.

The woman leaned over and put her head on his shoulder. He felt her hand at his hip, sliding something into his pocket. "Not much. Just wanted to make sure you got back okay."

"You're going to get yourself killed if you keep coming up here to find me." If her side didn't decide to kill her for this, his side definitely would.

A long minute passed before she replied. "Yeah."

They sat on her rock under the spruce just long enough for him to pretend he'd run three or four more kilometers. Finally, Paul stood up. Apple raked her fingers through his short, soon-to-be-graying brown hair. "Be careful."

He kissed her then ran back home.

The phone on his couch buzzed a minute and a half after he walked into the house, ready for another shower.

 _I mean it._

* * *

The Portland Library computers were the only ones in the city he could use without being traced. Apple'd made sure of that. She ran sweeps and spyware software remotely through all of them, and Apple knew what kinds of spies she was looking for.

Paul plugged the thumb drive she'd slipped into his pocket into one of the computers. It pulled up lists and lists of files. Most of them he'd already looked through, but a few were new.

 _Agatha Blake_

 _Pioneer Cemetery, Salem, Oregon_

 _There's a large, stone angel in the middle of the cemetery. Agatha Blake, twenty-four and pregnant, died from what is assumed to be internal hemorrhaging from an abusive partner. Her husband, Edgar Blake, was a well-known alcoholic and left town soon after Agatha's untimely death. Videos sent to me from a contact who knows a few tech-types in the area show the angel waking up sometime around midnight. A local fraternity has taken to sending new pledges to sit under the angel as a hazing ritual._

Paul stared at the picture of the carved stone angel. The rough hewing on her over-sized wings suggested quickly-completed workmanship. He shook his head.

The other files dealt with the video game console he'd helped move out of Ground Kontrol a few weeks earlier and a new player in Portland.

 _Justin Stevenson, 17. New resident of Portland, Oregon._

The dossier wasn't terribly in-depth, but Apple didn't often give him much to go on. They'd found their tenuous balance a while back; both knew the other wasn't entirely trustworthy. This time, however, Apple was right on the money. Something new was going on in the city, had been for the last few years. The year before, something big had happened in Eugene, but nobody was talking. Since then, Apple and he had found this middle ground. She sent him information on the players in town, and he promised to keep an eye on things from his end. If he ever did abandon ship, he'd need a place to go.

The first emails had covered the various vampires she knew of in the city, although there were few she'd actually met. The main one was Joseph Valle, an old, European vampire who owned one of the downtown clubs with a silent partner that Paul'd been unable to identify.

Slowly, she'd funneled him just a little bit of information on the local hunters: Felix Meyers, Jeff Neidermeyer, an old Vietnamese woman who called herself ChopChop, Harold Levinson, and now this Justin kid. Apple had mentioned that she thought there were more, maybe lots more, but she didn't know who or where they were. Things were getting hairy in Portland.

Paul pulled open an email and sent a message to Apple.

 _Send the new kid my card. I'll talk to your hunters._

He was going to end up so dead if the higher-ups knew what he was up to. Maybe he could manage to stay in the shadows long enough to figure out what his real goal was instead of chasing Apple around like some lovesick idiot. Actually meeting the hunters was either the first step in the right direction or the last step he'd ever make.

* * *

October 19, 2013

Justin and three others stood outside an impressive two-storey house in the West Hills. To the East, Mt. Hood peaked above fleecy white clouds. Apple trusted this guy. He had to be okay.

"You going to knock?" Felix asked.

Justin nodded. "Yeah. I just wondered whether he already knew we were here."

"How would he do that?" Jeff was already trying to peek in side windows.

"Cameras? Motion sensors? A lot of people have good security systems."

Jeff looked alarmed. "I'm not getting myself caught on any motion cameras!" The man, a sixty-plus-year-old veteran of whichever war he was currently bragging about, turned an about face and stalked back down the driveway.

"Where are you going?" ChopChop yelled after him.

"I'm not letting him get pictures of me!" Jeff hid behind one of the bushes.

"Felix, just please stay normal. I need normal right now." Justin raised his fist and knocked on the door.

The door opened to show a stunningly handsome man of moderate height with perhaps the most expensive haircut Justin had ever seen. Seriously, people needed to get their priorities straight. "Paul Craig?" Justin asked.

"Come in." Craig smiled and ushered Justin, ChopChop, and Felix into his lightly-furnished living room. The picture windows on the far wall perfectly outlined the view of Mt. Hood. At least now they knew why the house had been built.

"There are actually bylaws," Craig said as they continued to stare out the window. "You can't build a house tall enough to block anyone else's view. All very civilized. Tea?"

When he looked closer, Justin noticed wrinkles coming in around the corners of their host's eyes. They weren't the kind that came in with age. These wrinkles came with stress or with staring at a computer screen for too long. Either way, life wasn't currently a bowl of cherries for their Paul Craig.

An outfitted, bamboo tea tray sat on the dark-stained coffee table in the middle of the living room. A black leather Art Deco couch sat on either side. Both had views of the window.

Justin shifted uncomfortably on the couch.

ChopChop looked as comfortable as it was possible to look while still appearing completely unimpressed. She'd grabbed the end of her waist-length, black braid and started to mindlessly unbraid it. "This house is inconvenient," she said abruptly, causing Felix to jump slightly and nearly spill his tea. "Why do you want to live too far away? Not worried your house will fall down the hill? What if there is a big earthquake?" Her eyebrows rose almost to her hairline as she outlined every possible flaw in Craig's choice of home.

He laughed. It wasn't the kind of tight, judgmental snicker that Justin had expected from the man, but instead a full, rounded sound of actual amusement. "Sadly, ma'am, in a world of excess, this kind of place is exactly what you say and yet the most sought-after piece of land I could lay hands on."

"Don't call me ma'am unless you want something." ChopChop eyed him appraisingly and tossed the now-loose hair back over her narrow shoulder. "You want something?"

Craig put the tea he had not drunk back on the table and settled back on the couch. "Yes."

"I knew it!" Felix's gruff tenor cut through the room. His excitement soon faded, however, when he realized that everyone had turned to look at him. "Just..." Justin watched him try to find the words. "I mean, someone like you doesn't just get in contact with a ragtag little band like us because you need someone to drink tea with."

Craig nodded. "True. My motives are multi-faceted and highly ulterior." He passed around a plate of cookies. Only Justin availed himself of the free sugar. "There are two reasons I wanted to meet all of you. First, was simply to see what all the fuss is about."

"What kind of fuss?" Felix asked. "Who's fussing?"

"Lots of people, and lots of not-people."

"Monsters," Chopchop said firmly. "You mean lots of monsters. They know who we are." She crossed her arms hard over her chest and stared at Craig as though it would somehow open his mind and all his thoughts to her. Heck, as far as Justin knew, maybe it would.

"There's far more out there than just monsters and humans, my dear lady." ChopChop visibly bristled at the patronizing tone. "You, for example."

"What do you mean, _us_?" Felix asked as he returned his tea to the table. Outside, the drizzle turned to a sprinkle and spattered the windows with tiny droplets. Justin wondered about Jeff.

"I mean that nobody really knows where you all fit in this little mess of a world we've made."

"We're as human as it comes," Felix insisted.

"Are you?" Craig asked, eyebrows raised. "I saw a number of things from you lot at Ground Kontrol a while ago, and not all of it looked particularly _normal_."

Justin wondered just what _had_ happened. He'd been smart enough to get out before the suits could get a good look at him, but what about the others?

"No need to be normal." ChopChop sneered. "We make sure the monsters have no place to go. We keep people safe. Don't need to be normal to do that."

"Yes, I know," Craig replied. He stood up and walked over to the window. Far below, the city bustled away through its daily life.

"What about you?" Justin asked, eventually. "Are you like Apple?"

"More or less." Craig didn't turn back to look at them, although his shoulders did rise slightly. Something about Apple made him tense. "You could call us two sides of the same coin, although I know many people who wouldn't." Turning back to them, Craig's dark eyes bored into Justin. "It's all a matter of perspective, though, isn't it?"

Justin nodded but said nothing. His views on the subject were rarely popular and often got him laughed out of the few forums that had been put together on Hunter Net.

Craig looked at the three awkward people sitting around his coffee table. "I wanted to meet all of you so you would know that I'm here if there's anything you need. There's far more out there than I believe you're fully aware of. I collect stories and information. If you ever need anything-" He trailed off.

ChopChop looked incredibly unconvinced.

"You said there were two things," Felix put in, obviously on the fence about how he felt toward this guy.

"The other one is a bit of news that you might be interested in." Paul handed them the printouts about Agatha Blake and the Pioneer Cemetery. "Given what I saw of you at Ground Kontrol, this looked right up your alley."

* * *

On the way out the door, Justin turned to Felix and said, "You need to tell me about Ground Kontrol."

Felix shrugged. "Not a lot to tell. We were trying to figure out what was going on with that game box when that guy - I think it was him - and a buncha others showed up and took it away."

"And.." Justin prompted.

"And nothing. They just came in and took it. Said it was 'faulty' and needed repairs or something. Everyone just did what those guys said and let them walk off with it."

Justin nodded.

* * *

There were cameras around the edges of the Pioneer Cemetery. A few years ago, there'd been a number of vandal attacks, and the city had raised money to put in a few security cameras to catch what they assumed was going to be frat kids of high schoolers. Turned out the attacks were coming from a group that desperately didn't want to get caught. Vampires never really did. They'd installed encryptions on the cameras but never really gotten around to getting them taken down. The existence of the tech was really all Paul needed.

He watched the low-res, silent footage of the three people he'd met and one other wander through the cemetery until they found Agatha Blake's angel. The angel woke up and began to attack the group. Her giant, stone arms and wings must've hurt as they swept the Felix off his feet.

There was something both adorable and intimidating that Justin's reaction was to talk to the angel. Maybe he was trying to reason with it. The old woman who'd been staring at him pulled out a sharpened kitchen knife that even the scans he could use the cameras for didn't quite know what to do with. It was a knife, but the scans read something close to what they found at nodes. Interesting. She attacked the angel with the knife.

Justin continued talking to it.

As the fight progressed, Felix spent more time on the ground than on his feet. He was going to be sore the next day. Paul wondered whether he could find a way to send something for the pain. Technically, his relationship with the hunters was purely intellectual, meant for gathering information on them, but he'd kind of liked the little group of underdogs. They had spirit, like Apple.

The fight didn't take long. Justin carved something into the headstone at the angel's feet, and somehow that calmed her.

Paul grabbed his cell phone and sent a message to his contacts.

 _Threat in Salem neutralized. Agatha Blake banished. No need to send reinforcements. Agent Craig will oversee cleanup._

He shoved the Union-Issued device back into his pocket. Whatever was going on in Portland was going to prove very interesting if he could just keep himself alive while it happened.


	7. Home Sweet Home

December 4, 2013

Resolutely barefoot, Gale Carey sat before the council. She hated umbral travel, but certain events (like a call from the InterTradition Council of Nine) called for such work. At least it was easier for her than for most of the other people in the room. For seven hours, she'd listened to reports from around the world, managers talking about the new teams of specialists who would be and had been put together, the rise of vampiric cults, the spread of some book that was shaking up several quiet academics (none of whom were actually present to talk about it), and the spread of the enigmatic Hunters.

Gale herself had talked about the sudden influx of shifters in Forest Park, the large green space in western Portland, and yesterday's sudden drying up of Crater Lake. The room buzzed with life at that. Nobody could figure out where the hell the water had gone.

As the day of speeches and over-sharing ended, Gale stood and stretched. She sent a quick text to Apple to say that she'd be returning to the city that night.

 _Things finished earlier than expected. I'll be home soon. Feel free to send your friends my way if they're interested._

Gale slipped through reality into the over-decorated living room of the house boat in which she lived. As always, she felt the rush of thankfulness for the ease with which she could step through the folds of reality. The others could end up nursing wounds for weeks. 2:17 AM. Could've been worse. Apple would definitely still be up, but Gale wouldn't have to worry about seeing the hunters until at least the next afternoon. Plenty of time to get some sleep.

A hand-calligraphed letter rested on the floor just inside her front door, sealed with a wax impression of the ring Joseph wore, a laurel crown with a droplet in the middle of it. He'd have to wait. She didn't have the mental wherewithal to deal with reclusive anachronisms. Vampires really did make for odd business partners.

The night was colder than she had expected given the morning before. From the back of her brown velour couch in her technicolor, hippie-chic living room, Gale grabbed a crocheted blanket and said a word of appreciation for her mother who'd made it. She wrapped it around her shoulders and stepped through the sliding glass doors onto the back porch that sat almost at water level.

Gale'd chosen to put the house at the end of the dock just so she'd have an interrupted view of the river. On the back porch, she curled up on the lounger she spent so many nights on. She'd probably fall asleep there again. The red star twinkled and shone in the distance. Celestial object 2001KX76 was beautiful, no matter what it meant.

* * *

December 5, 2013

The hunters were going to be earlier than she'd expected, given the text from Apple.

 _They're on their way. Good luck. Be gentle with them, please._

It wasn't as if the various mages in town had gotten together with a plan for what to do with the hunters, but Gale knew the little group had met at least Apple and that asshole traitor on the hill.

"You respect Apple," she reminded herself as she went through the motions of making tea. "Apple respects Craig." She put out chipped, hand-thrown mugs and one or two bought ones and poured hot water into the large, cherry red teapot. "Therefore, you ought to respect Craig." It was that last leap in logic that always seemed to get stuck. For the life of her, Gale couldn't figure out why Apple actually liked and trusted the man. Given half a chance, he'd probably try to kill them all for being reality deviants.

Tea ready, coffee ground, some kind of local, gluten-free coffee cake set out. Gale figured she was as ready as she was going to get for visitors. She headed upstairs to put on her 'costume' before they arrived.

* * *

 _Thunk! Thunk!_

The rapping pulled Gale back down from the lofted upstairs about an hour later. Through the upper window, she'd spied a small knot of people waiting at her door. From the way Apple talked, she'd really only expected about two. Instead, she had a small army of hunters and hoped she'd make it out alive.

 _Why am I doing this again?_ she asked herself on the way down the stairs. _Right. Networking, crazy wolves, new kids on the block, something like that._

Gale smoothed down the hippie ensemble she'd changes into: crepe skirt, hand-knit shawl, and big hoop earrings. She'd even pulled her hair down to enliven the look. People usually let their guard down when they just thought she was a bit nutty.

"Good afternoon," she said, slowly pulling the door open. On the other side was a teenager in a black hoodie, an old Asian woman with a narrowed expression, an old man who might've come along for the potential food (given the look on his face), and a young blonde woman who looked like an artist or art student, if Gale knew the type.

The young woman pushed to the front and put her hand out to Gale. "Nice to meet you. I'm Caitlyn Finnerty." Her hair was pulled back into a neat, smooth ponytail that hung past her shoulders and she wore paint-stained jeans and a button-down flannel shirt. Definitely an art student. She pumped Gale's hand firmly once or twice and let it fall. Gale wondered whether the woman was as assertive in other parts of her life.

 _Showtime._

"Come in. Apple said you'd be coming." Gale replied, working to bring her voice a little higher. She was going for something between floaty and ethereal.

The group filed in uncomfortably, and Gale offered coffee cake, tea, and coffee. ("What? No milk?" the old woman had asked. The old man has simply taken two of everything.)

Once everyone had introduced themselves and then availed themselves of food, she led Justin, Caitlyn, ChopChop, and Jeff through the beaded curtains into the small but open living room, scattered over with large pillows to sit on. She sat cross legged in front of the sliding doors that led out onto the porch and looked around at them.

The teenager squirmed and ate more coffee cake.

Still she waited. People opened up more when they'd been made uncomfortable, she'd found.

The old man farted.

"What have you come looking for?" she asked, fingering the beading on her shawl. "Apple was not clear."

The visitors looked from one to another awkwardly. The old woman drank her tea and looked at no one. Finally, Justin looked up. "We want to know about the other hunters. Madeline and Eric won't say anything about what happened in Eugene."

The old man nodded his head vigorously. "Goin' to get somebody killed, and I'm not going to let it be me," he insisted. "You don't get to keep intel to yourself if you want to run a good squad." He ate another bite of his coffee cake and snorted his derision at the other two hunters whom Gale had never heard of.

"Well, I'm afraid you'll have to be a bit more specific than that, Jeff." she started. "I don't know the people you're talking about."

"Apple said you could tell us about things that have happened before. Like you read tarot or something?" Caitlyn insisted. "She said you could give us information on what's happened. If you can't do it-" she started to get up.

Gale did everything she could to keep herself from laughing. The young woman was a tough nut. Good for her. "Oh, that I can do," she replied, sliding back into her divination voice, the one she used when she had actually done tarot in a bookstore in the past. "But first, you have to answer something for me."

"Something like what?" ChopChop asked, glaring across the top of the Powell's City of Books mug.

"Everything's a trade in this world," Gale insisted, "including my help. I want to know about you. What are you? Where do you come from? What can you do? How do you learn it?" Okay, the floaty voice might have slipped a bit there, but this was important stuff.

Caitlyn looked confused, but the old man barked out a laugh and said, "We're people. What're you?"

Gale raised her eyebrows in what she hoped would be read as disdain.

They glared at one another for a full thirty seconds before Justin piped up, "We don't know."

"But you must know something," Gale insisted. Every mage knew, somehow. They all had _that story_ about the first time. Well, almost all of them did.

"You just see," ChopChop replied tightly. "Before it happens, you can't see. Then you can see. When you see, you know what you have to do." She patted her pocket menacingly. "You have to take care of whatever mess you find."

Justin looked somewhat shocked by the woman's words, which could only mean that the hunters were about as factioned as the mages. Good. That was good to know.

"What kind of seeing?" Gale asked, looking directly at Caitlyn.

The art student, however, just shrugged and pushed a few crumbs around on her plate. "Nothing special. Things are just a little more obvious, I guess."

"It's not like that, and you know it," Justin insisted.

Caitlyn shrugged again and put one of the bigger crumbs in her mouth.

Justin turned to Gale, "There's a lot out there. Heck, Felix says he was able to see after he met a werewolf. I met Apple. I think ChopChop saw some kind of ghost, right?" He turned to the woman who was glaring so hard she'd forgotten about her tea. "Anyway, it's just a thing that happens."

Gale nodded. She'd take it. That was enough for her. "Well, okay, then. Let's see about seeing what happened in Eugene, okay?"

* * *

December 9, 2013

The club had been decorated in dark, heavy wood and rich hunter green. It looked like a gentleman's study in an episode of some period drama. The dark stained maple bar curved along more of the wall than was strictly necessary and hosted by a very attractive 20-something who had likely just graduated from one of Portland's many bartending schools. He'd do until they could find someone a little more permanent. The young, pretty ones never stuck around very long. There was a lot more money to be made in California.

Sitting in Sorrow Verdes (how had she let him name their club that?), Gale reflected on the group she'd met that afternoon.

"So, they were interesting?" Joseph asked. He'd been in an awful huff when she'd shown up. He didn't like his letters being ignored. Damned whiney vampire.

She swirled the whiskey in the bottom of her tumbler for a few seconds, hoping it would bring clarity to her thoughts. "They were different."

"But you said Apple trusts them."

"Yeah. She does."

For whatever reason, that seemed to be enough for Joseph. What was it about Apple that inspired such incredible trust in those around her?

"Are you going to help them again?"

"Maybe. I don't really know whether they're going to need my help to be honest. From what I've heard, I should just be thankful that they didn't try to murder me on sight." Gale tossed back the end of the glass and rubbed her eyes. Life was getting complicated. She hated complications.

"What did they want from you?" Joseph asked of a small glass of whiskey and water he wouldn't drink for the whole night.

"They wanted to see the massacre in Eugene." She'd lied. Everyone knew about it.

"When Trajan had the Nos hack into hunter net?"

Gale nodded. Apple'd figured out the leak long ago, but apparently she hadn't felt much of a need to share with the hunters. "Yeah. Apple closed the hole they used, but it seems the hunters who survived didn't feel much like sharing what happened."

Joseph shrugged aristocratically. "Well, it was a messy night."

"True." Gale thought back to the hunters. She'd shown them the event. Everyone joined hands, and she'd taken them back there to see for themselves. As it turned out, hunters were about as squeamish about Time Peaking as anyone else not used to it. They'd bolted from the house as quickly as possible once they'd came back to themselves. Somewhere in the background of her thoughts, the evening's musicians started to warm up.

Joseph, whose chair had an actual view of the small stage in the club, smiled at the two instrumentalists. "I found them at Willamette University. The maribaist is taking her Ph.D. in music performance and the cellist is studying for her Master's."

The two women wore matching black skirts and button-down white shirts. One had nearly-blonde hair in a tight bun and pale brown eyes that took in a lot more than she could see. She gave Gale an uneasy feeling when their eyes met. Someone to watch out for perhaps.

"Listen, Joseph, I've got a lot to do. One of my friends up North wants some help with a project he's putting together." She stood, dropped a light, European kiss above his left shoulder, and walked out without paying. She didn't like the look of that musician.


	8. Thanksgiving in the Hunter Cave

November 12, 2013

Justin was slow to trust. He knew that. After getting kicked out of home by your own parent, who wouldn't be? But it was cold in the city, and Justin had needed a place to sleep. At least, that had been Felix's argument when Justin had actually decided to ask for help.

"We can't just let him freeze to death under one of those bridges!" Felix had said in that terse, grown-up kind of way where you talk about someone as if they're not there.

Eric, the object of the very controlled tirade, had been only slightly moved. "We barely know the kid, Felix. How do you really expect anyone to trust him?"

"After what happened in Salem, I'd say we know him well enough. He was willing to put his life on the line just like the rest of us, Eric."

It took a long time before Justin figured out that Felix was trying to get Eric to let Justin live in the house that Auntie Candy had left to her favorite nephew.

"It's just sitting there empty," Felix argued.

"We use it for meetings and such. Why would we need it to be more than that?"

"It doesn't need to be more, but it could be. It could be like a home base for us when people need to come to this part of town or for Madeline when she comes up from Salem."

Eric shifted his weight from one foot to another and grumbled but eventually gave in. Felix's suggestion had a certain ring of truth to it. "You can stay," he said, finally addressing Justin. "Just don't wreck stuff or steal stuff or anything. If you break anything, you have to fix it or replace it, you hear?" He left soon after, still looking more than a little put out by the turn of events.

"Honestly," Felix said, turning to Justin, "that was easier than I thought it'd be."

Justin smiled tentatively. He hadn't had a home since March.

"Well, let's get everything set up!" Felix was excited about the project, bouncing on the balls of his feet as though he couldn't wait to get started.

"You need a hobby," Justin observed.

"I have one now!" Felix looked around with a near-manic glint in his eye. "For right now, this place is going to be our hobby."

* * *

It took three days before Felix remembered that it was almost Thanksgiving. "We have to do something! We should all get together or something, you know?" he exclaimed from the other side of the IKEA bed they were attempting to assemble. The house had been completely bare of furnishings, so Justin had been sleeping curled up on Felix's couch until they could get him a bed. He'd insisted that a bed wasn't necessary; the couch was comfortable enough! Felix had insisted.

Justin had his doubts about Thanksgiving. "It doesn't seem like anyone really gets along very well. Why do you think they'd manage to for Thanksgiving?" Justin was also aware that many of the hunters had families, although he wasn't about to let on how much research he'd done on the others. As yet, it had just been a bit of light Googling, but that was definitely going to change now that he'd taken up residence in the Hunter Cave. (Okay, not a cave, technically a suburban single level, but it still had a nice ring to it!)

"Because it's an important holiday. A lot of us don't have somewhere else to go. Maybe you and I can get the place set up and ready and have a combination unveiling and feast." He tightened the last screw and stood up proudly. "Let's get this bad boy in position."

Justin went along. He hadn't seen Felix this cheery in a long time. Usually the bald techie spent most of his time being a grouch. Maybe he just liked building things.

Together, Justin and Felix shoved the MALM frame against the wall and admired their handiwork. If they were going to renovate the place completely in time, they'd need to make another run to IKEA. "What all did you have in mind for 'getting the place set up'?" Justin asked tentatively. The bed alone had left blisters on two of his fingers.

Felix thought the question over, stroking the sparse beard on his chin in an almost self-mocking manner. After a moment, he stood up and started walking through the few rooms. "Beyond basic furniture like a couch and chairs and a table to eat at, we should try to make the place a bit more secure. We do have a tendency to attract attention from things-"

"Speak for yourself," Justin said, crossing his arms with a grin. "I only draw attention if I try to."

"Fair," Felix conceded, "but I still want the place as safe as we can make it. Eric gave me the go-ahead to do whatever I thought necessary. So, we'll want to take out the skylights and replace the glass in the windows with shatterproof stuff," he continued, pointing at the offending points of ingress. "Maybe blackout curtains over the windows, too, so nobody can tell when we're home or not."

Justin nodded and took a second look at the place. "If you want it really secure, you'll do a lot more than that."

"What'd you have in mind?"

"How about using an invisible fencing setup to trigger perimeter warnings? We could also put cameras in all the windows and facing the doors. Heck, I could even install little ones at the crossroads nearby. Then we'll know whether there's anyone casing the place."

Felix nodded, the smile on his face slowly growing. "That sounds like fun."

"I have some friends who can program basically anything. I'll see what kind of autorecognition software they can pull together."

"Anyone I know?"

Justin shrugged. "Not likely." He knew that Felix hadn't met Apple and 5M1L33 lived on the East Coast.

They walked through the rest of the house, planning a few other fixes to up the security on the place. After a lot of discussion, they opted to disguise the door to the basement with a false front that looked like the back wall of a pantry.

"We really should get the basement finished, though," Felix insisted.

"Not really. It should be okay the way it is. We could finish part of it to create a computer center and to store some extra canned food or something just in case, but I think total renovation is overkill."

* * *

Felix sent out notes to all the hunters in the area, inviting them to the biggest, best Thanksgiving they'd ever attend. Justin thought that Felix was overselling it, but what did he know?

Renovations took them up until almost the last day. On Wednesday night, they were sitting together in the finished house, surveying their handiwork over beers. Felix insisted that he didn't want to know how old Justin was. Justin figured the old guy already knew.

Neither of them could cook, so the whole meal was going to be delivered by a local-source, organic catering company the next day around 4:30.

* * *

Justin figured that everything would've gone a lot better if Felix had required some kind of RSVP. "You just figured everyone would come, didn't you?" he asked at 5:00 when nobody had shown up yet.

Felix looked over the mountains of mashed potatoes, two turkeys, six pies, and small army of wine bottles.

The perimeter warning sounded, a tweeting bird that went off in every room and sounded to Justin as if it were dying. The twittering was closely followed by a knock on the door and then another, much more insistent one.

"Who's there?" Felix yelled as he jogged through the living room.

"You said we have food!" ChopChop replied as she barged into the house, black and silver hair doing it best to escape from what was probably a tightly wound bun hours earlier.

Given the disheveled state of Caitlyn's typically neatly groomed, artistic exterior and everpresent blonde ponytail, it seemed as though ChopChop might have actually physically dragged the film student with her. Alternately, maybe Caitlyn just had the bad luck of showing up at the same time; she was fine if there was a goal, but dinner 'amongst friends' apparently left her with no idea of how to cope.

Felix nearly glowed with happiness. "There's so much food! Come eat!" He ushered them over to the light pine table that had been pulled out to accommodate eight comfortably, although Felix had insisted that he was expecting ten.

They sat together, Caitlyn still looking like a deer in headlights.

"Do we have to say grace or something?" Justin asked.

ChopChop was already gnawing her way into a turkey leg she'd pulled off with her hands. "No," she replied vehemently through an open mouth. "You just be thankful when you eat. Eat!"

Caitlyn took mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. "I'm vegetarian," she commented when Felix eagerly offered her turkey and gravy.

Halfway through the third bottle of wine, Jeff showed up, too. Justin was somewhat relieved to see the old man. After what had happened with the PsyPhi game, he was never sure when Jeff was about to get in over his head and 'mysteriously disappear.' Unlike ChopChop, Jeff didn't bother to knock. Letting himself in, the pensioner yelled, "There better be pie at this dinner!"

Justin shook his head and ate more of the honey glazed carrots before Caitlyn finished them off.

* * *

After a week of visiting and getting to take advantage of the leftover pies, Felix decided that it was a good idea for the house to always have food, water, and anything else they might need readily available, especially if they were going to expect either Jeff or ChopChop to show up when asked. Felix set Justin up with a house account with a limited (although, really, not all that limited) budget.

It wasn't a bad gig, really. Justin spent most of his time in the house talking with friends on HunterNet and keeping an eye on the people and cars that came and went in the area. His only real job was to make sure that the Hunter Cave remained a secure hideout for anyone who needed it. After a few weeks of Felix 'just being in the area' with a blanket or socks or cup of coffee, Justin learned to accept what he was offered with few complaints. It was nice that someone worried about him, even if he wasn't really sure how much he trusted Felix, let alone any of the other hunters.


	9. The St John's Bridge

August 21, 1949

As they had for the last three weeks, the Taylor family gathered near the foot of the St. John's Bridge to hold vigil for the young woman whose life had been untimely ripped from her.

They bowed their heads in prayer. Who can say when it is right to let someone go? Who can say what the right thing to do is?

* * *

August 6, 2013

Catherine drove the squad car slowly through downtown Portland. Unless it was absolutely necessary, she tried to keep her speed similar to that of the cyclists, about 15-20 miles per hour at most.

Mark was on the phone.

The radio crackled to life: "Calling for a car in the SE area. Can someone go out to to the St. John's Bridge? We have a situation."

Mark ended his call and picked up the radio receiver. "This is officers Hall and Glass. What kind of situation?"

Whoever was on the other end of the end had no interest in formality. "I don't know. We got an anonymous tip that someone heard screaming on the east side of the bridge. Probably just kids, but..." The voice trailed off, unconvinced.

It wasn't the first time that cops had been called out to the bridge or the first time that they'd found nothing there. Mark muttered the whole way back about a waste of their time. Catherine wasn't so sure.

* * *

December 4, 2013

Kenton drove the car up beside the high school. At six o'clock, things were already dark, and he had his lights turned on. The volleyball team had just finished practice.

"Hey, Chloe!" he called from the open window. "Chloe!"

A pretty, blonde sophomore with nut-colored eyes and strong hands looked over at the van. She hauled her gym bag over her left shoulder. "What do you want?"

Kenton smiled winningly and wrapped her in the wanting that he knew would bring her to him. Chloe's worried expression softened into a smile, as did those of her friends. "I'm here to pick you up."

Chloe twirled a piece of hair around her finger thoughtfully. "But, I don't know you." The tone of her voice, however, had shifted from suspicious to almost coy. She stepped up to the side of the dark blue van and leaned on the driver's side door.

"That's okay," Kenton insisted. "Everything's going to be fine. You need a safe way to get home, right?"

"Yeah, but my dad's going to come get me, soon," Chloe insisted weakly.

Kenton placed a hand on her shoulder and stared into her eyes. "It's okay, Chloe. You can come with me."

Chloe's eyes slid out of focus as her smile broadened. "I can go with you." She waved good-bye to her friends and walked around the front of the van.

Deep in his own mind, Kenton could feel that he'd done well. He'd be rewarded.

* * *

December 5, 2013

She was on the phone again. "I'm sorry, Mr. Hancock, but there's not a lot I can do. We've talked to her classmates. Nobody's seen Chloe since last night. We're following up on some leads, but nothing's turned up so far. We'll let you know as soon as we know."

Catherine hung up the phone, head in her hands.

"What's up?" Mark asked as he came around to lean on her desk.

"This is probably the worst part of my job," she replied without looking up. "I hate telling someone that I don't know anything when my not knowing is ripping them up."

Mark patted her on the shoulder. "I'll get some coffee."

As he walked off, Catherine felt for her cell phone in her pocket. Trying hard not to overthink things, she pulled it out and shot a quick text to the phone number she'd been given.

The response arrived less than five minutes later.

 _Just getting to know the new guy. Nothing important. What can I do?_

Forty-five minutes later, she was cautiously sitting with a man she barely knew, preparing to talk about impossible things over a cup of coffee.

"What if there were more strange things?" she asked from the far side of a skim vanilla latte.

Felix had a small dab of whipped cream on his nose. Catherine figured he had no idea it was there. She also wasn't sure that there was any coffee whatsoever in the sugar-laden 'coffee' he'd ordered. "What kind of strange things?" he asked.

How could one put the idea without sounding unhinged? "Well, the things at that Japanese grocery store weren't normal. You told me to call if I found or saw or heard about anything else not normal."

Felix took a long drink from his chocolate-whatsit. He seemed particularly pleased by the crushed peppermint candy sprinkled over the top.

"There's been a kidnapping, I think, and we have no idea where the girl who was taken ended up." Catherine nursed her lukewarm latte, trying to decide how to continue. "But I think there's more to it than that."

"How so?"

"I was doing some research. See, the girl's from a particular area, a particular age, and looks a particular way. She fits a profile."

Felix drank more and waited. Damn him for just sitting there. Catherine was sure he could make her feel less crazy if he actually wanted to.

"The profile includes a handful of murders over the decades, one every eight years. Always a fifteen-year-old girl. Always blonde. Always from the same area." The side of the cardboard cup crumpled as Catherine tried to keep her voice steady. "I don't want to find this girl just to find her dead," she said quietly.

"I understand that," Felix replied, finishing off his drink. "Who's the girl?"

She looked around the coffee shop. Not a cop in sight. "Chloe Hancock."

Felix's head snapped up. "Eric's daughter?"

Catherine nearly jumped as her heart did panicked flip-flops. "How do you know Eric? I'm not supposed to talk about ongoing cases. Please don't tell him these things. I have no real proof, you know."

"He'll understand, Catherine." Felix reached out, awkwardly squeezed her shoulder, and left enough money on the table to cover both of their drinks and a large tip. "I have to go. Thank you."

She watched him leave through a slowly-ebbing haze of panic. What had she done?

* * *

Kenton stood over the sleeping girl's body. Behind him, that same ghastly presence that could feel and talk without a body seemed to be smiling.

"Very well done, Kenton," the voice said. It was soft and cajoling, pleasing almost if it hadn't been so very disembodied. It slid past him toward the body on the ground. "She's even still alive, for the moment. Very well done."

He shivered in spite of the fact that he hadn't really felt the cold in years. It was one of the perks of death.

The quiet in the night was almost oppressive. No frogs croaked; no crickets sang. Under the western legs of the St. John's Bridge, weeds grew tall around them . The green structure seemed to glow slightly in the moonlight, casting an eerie shadow over the body on the ground.

The spirit pressed herself down through the flesh of the young woman, settling in her body as a hand in a glove. She wrapped herself in it, snuggling deep with a contented sigh, and Kenton could feel her happiness. "Now, we have-"

"Stop!"

"Leave her alone!"

"Chloe!"

Three separate, panicked voices shattered the relative quiet of the night.

Chloe's eyes turned to Kenton. "They cannot find me. Stop them."

Instantly, the vampire turned and ran in the direction of the voices. He reached out, senses crawling feet in front of him to find them. Their scent permeated even the thick, earthy smell of evening dew in soil, and the sounds of their hushed words and breathing echoed like shouts in the darkness. Kenton knew where they'd hidden themselves long before he ever reached them. The three who'd yelled had scattered across the underbrush near the bridge. A fourth sat in a nearby tree, thirty feet off the ground.

* * *

Catherine Hall knew that no matter how long she lived, she'd never forget the sound of the shot that pierced Chloe Hancock's heart. It had rung out from up high somewhere, somewhere nearby. The others were jabbering about what had happened, how strange Chloe had seemed, wondering where the shooter, a doctor they'd recently met, had gone. Catherine simply sat next to the body on the ground, her own hands covered in Chloe's blood, and broke a little on the inside. She'd failed. Whatever it was that existed out in the darkness that was quickly closing in around them had taken Chloe with it, and she'd failed to do her job, to keep safe the young woman she'd sworn to protect.

Felix sat with her, and Catherine knew he felt no less anger, no less failure.

Behind them, the girl's father was screaming for the blood of her murderer.

"Either you're coming with me or not, Harold, but I don't care. That Ben-Ami sonuvabitch is going to have to have a short conversation with the other end of a crowbar!"

Harold was calm. He must know, Catherine thought, that Chloe's murderer was far gone already. Mark had called for reinforcements, but they had little chance of catching him.

After a minute or two of tense conferring, Harold and Eric left. They didn't say where they were going. Catherine didn't ask.

She sat with Chloe because she thought someone should stay with her.

* * *

Not so many hours later, Dr. Ben-Ami sat in a comfortable office in Tacoma, Washington. The glass-walled building commanded an unimpressive view of some trees and a highway.

"Doctor." A forgettable man in an impeccable black suit greeted him and sat down in the available armchair. He seemed uncomfortable being subjected to such luxury. Dr. Ben-Ami showed no such discomfort. "I am Agent Watt, and I want you to tell me about the death of Chloe Hancock."

The doctor, Alon Ben-Ami, shook his head. "Agent of what?"

"I'm part of a special group here. Depending on how your story runs, we may have a proposition for you."

"I do not know how Chloe Hancock died, Agent." He pressed the title, trying it out in his mouth. "She was dead when we arrived at the bridge."

"If she was already dead, why did you and your friends bother going after her?"

"My colleagues and I were attempting to ascertain what had happened to Eric Hancock's daughter Chloe. When we arrived at the park, I became aware that she had already passed from the world of the living. All that was left to do was take care of the thing that had infested her body."

Agent Watt nodded and took notes on a tablet computer that had appeared from the depths of his crisp jacket. "I see."

Dr. Ben-Ami pressed on. "Had I had my own way, I would not have killed the creature who'd occupied her body as I've yet to have the chance to analyze either port-mortem specimens or those embodying spiritual energies. I've long wanted to run my own tests to determine just what it is those who are able to haunt the living are made from. If we knew, their capture and extermination would be far simpler."

Agent Watt tapped away on his tablet and then waited. Silence built in the office, closing around both men. Alon Ben-Ami was a patient man.

Sliding the tablet back into his pocket, Agent Watt smiled. "Dr. Ben-Ami, I'm prepared to offer you a position here with The Guiding Hand. We have an open place in our research division if you would like to fill it. We're certain your particular skills would be more than appreciated there. I believe that we'd be uniquely able to offer you a wide variety of specimens to study." Standing, he offered his hand to the doctor. "What do you say, Doctor?"

Alon Ben-Ami stood as well and grasped Agent Watt's hand. "I'd be delighted." He might be patient, but he also knew an opportunity when he saw it.

"Excellent. If you come with me, we can get you set up in the labs here. At the moment, we're running our NorthWest operations out of Leading Sun Communications. However, there may be a position open for you in New York sooner rather than later."

Agent Watt led Alon from the conference room. Behind them, the sun had just begun to rise.

* * *

Once he'd deposited Dr. Ben-Ami on the lower floors, Agent Watt pulled the tablet back from his pocket. In the comfort of his own office, one far less plush than Ms. Palmer's had been, he flipped through the messages the away team had sent in.

 _Officer's partner apprehended. Mark Glass enrolment confirmed. Looking to intercept Eric Hancock. Will update._

Agent Watt rubbed his eyes then reached for a bottle of MetaCaff+ he kept closeby. It'd been developed by one of the chemists in the London office: a single pill gave an agent two days worth of energy with no need for sleep or concurrent side effects. He was going to need those two days.


	10. Waking from a Dream

17 January, 2014

Normally when a coma patient awakens, somebody notices. There are nurses everywhere in the hospital, shouldn't somebody notice? No matter how long the patient's been kept on life support, no matter how many people do or don't go see him or her, someone really ought to notice.

Nobody noticed when she woke up. Nobody really noticed when she climbed out of bed. Surprisingly, nobody paid any attention when she pulled on her breeches, coat, and surcoat, sheathed her sword, and strode with purpose from the hospital. Until she suddenly stopped, she had not known she'd been dreaming .

The rest of Portland, however, suddenly began to.

* * *

A pair of identical twin girls with shoulder-length black hair and matching green dresses were ecstatic over the change. Meet and Greet walked through the city at first light. Holding hands, they strolled the spokes of the wheel that made up Ladd's Addition in SE Portland. Sometime around 4AM, the entire little area had been transformed. It almost looked like home: dark verdant forest with little thatched houses scattered throughout. Jack Madison, former hunter and current shut-in, was going to wake up to find himself with nothing to wear but breeches, a linen shirt, and a red cape. Meet couldn't help laughing at the appropriateness of it all.

"Do you know who did it?" Greet asked her sister.

"No, but it's going to be fun." Meet pulled a perfectly red apple from a nearby tree that had never before borne fruit. "Don't you think so?"

"Only if it doesn't mess things up. We need to find out who did it. What if they get to Seattle? They could throw off all of the plans."

Taking a large bite from the apple, Meet considered for a moment. "Do you think we should tell someone?"

"I think it would be a good idea." Greet took the apple from her sister. "Don't you?" She also took a bite.

"Probably, but I want to stay and watch. We could just make sure that whoever did it doesn't get too far."

Greet tossed the apple over her left shoulder. In moments, it sunk into someone's front yard, took root, and grew into a tall, strong apple tree that bore fruit as well. "I guess we can stick around for a little while."

Somewhere in the trees to their left, something growled. A pair of bright, shining eyes glowed between the leaves. "Maybe we should leave something for Jack just in case he doesn't remember who he is when he wakes up."

"I don't think that's how they work, but we might as well," Greet agreed.

Holding hands, they walked back to the cottage. He'd been sweet to them after all, leaving out fruit and sometimes bread. No reason to let him die just for a bit of fun.

* * *

The strong little fist rapped three times on the door to the Hunter Cave.

Dressed in floor-length, midnight blue robes decorated with tiny, glittering stars, Justin opened the door. He looked out left and right and then finally down before noticing the dwarf who was waiting with a scroll in his hand. "Can I help you?" Justin asked.

A brusque voice answered. Maybe it just sounded hoarser because it had to find its way around the impressive beard hiding the dwarf's face. "This is for you and your kind." He slapped the scroll into Justin's outstretched hand and blinked out of existence.

It took a moment before Justin was able to turn his focus from the person who was no longer there to the piece of rolled parchment in his hand.

 _Trapped in the tower, your princess awaits. Who will set her free?_

How did one get in contact with other people without some kind of phone? Justin looked down at the pointed hat sitting where the laptop Felix had bought him used to be. Everything else in the house was different. Justin could only conclude that the laptop was, somehow, now a hat. This was going to difficult.

* * *

The city was quiet for early evening. The Knight, now fully awake, found her way through the rows and rows of medical tents perched on Marquam Hill. The day before, those tents had been a brick and mortar hospital.

The Knight strode through the quiet town. Near the base of the hill, she spotted a university. Great banners flew from the battlements, declaring it a place of higher learning. She knew she would find what she needed there.

The young friar who guarded the door showed her to the training grounds without a word. No words were needed. The Knight was clearly on a holy quest, sent by some higher power to right great wrongs. Why else would she be there?

A horse, her horse, trotted through the park blocks over newly-minted cobbles that seemed a thousand years old. The Knight didn't understand about pavement and cement, so they had no place in her world. As long as Portland was her world, such things would have no place there.

* * *

The Dark Forest (formerly known as Forest Park) was rarely entered by those who valued their lives. The magic that lay within its boundaries and the dangerous creatures who called the forest their home drove off all those who would even consider entering.

Inside the stooped little hut in the very center of the forest, three women sat waiting around a fire. The eldest, who had three eyes in her face, looked everywhere but where they sat. "They're on their way. They're here!" she said finally. The others beside her stirred. The sister with two eyes replied, "Not yet! We are still waiting!" The youngest, who had only one eye, responded to neither of them. As she saw only the past, she thought she was still asleep.

Moments later, the front door banged open, and Robin Hood, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Merlin, Aladdin, Death, and someone's lost and overly pouffy fairy godmother stood on the threshold. Aladdin and the fairy godmother were pointedly avoiding one another. The youngest sister screamed with laughter that nobody else shared.

"Dear ladies," the bald Robin Hood said, "we've been wandering in circles for hours. Can you help us find our way to-" He turned to Merlin. "Who did you say gave you the scroll?"

"A dwarf," the very young Merlin replied.

Robin Hood turned back to the residents of the cottage. "Can you help us find our way to the dwarf?"

"Of course we can," the sister with two eyes said. She stood from the stool and ushered the group out the front door. "We'd be happy to help," she said in her reedy little voice, "if you'd just be so kind as to get us a few of those beautiful apples in the tree behind the house.

Inside the house, the sister with three eyes watched what would come. Before anyone else heard it, she heard them give up on the apples, magic fruit that could only grow when one exposed regrets, and start talking. Their tears at the recent loss of a young woman watered the tree, and new apples grew heavy on the branches, sweet and close and easy to pick. The middle sister pointed them away from the cottage toward the golden forest.

Many minutes later, the middle sister actually did tell them where to go. With her long, knobbled finger directing them south, she said, "Go through the golden forest to the rushing river. Do not turn back. Do not stray." She placed the magic compass that had been hidden in the apple the strangers had given her into the fairy's hand. "You'll be fine if you trust what you have and what you know."

The fairy opened the brass cover on the compass and looked at it. She glanced once back at the old woman, but both she and the cottage had vanished. Together, the group set off to the south with the sparkling, glittering, twinkling fairy leading the way, compass in one hand and useless wand in the other.

* * *

The rushing river made almost sound as it wound its way under the golden forest. The shade of a middle aged woman stood some distance from the ferryman. She saw only those moments of her life she still could remember, a few birthdays and that one time she'd managed to successfully bake a quiche. The attack that had killed her had nothing to do with her really. She knew she'd just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. At least, she was pretty sure. None of her memories suggested that she'd done anything to end up here.

The scrabbling and scratching of incoming travelers shook her from her reverie. Did they know? Who were they? What did they want? They didn't belong by the river.

"Miss? Ma'am?" Someone was speaking to her. She had to pull herself forward to think, to pay attention.

She blinked. "Yes?"

"Can you help us?"

The young woman who had spoken was dressed in an over-long, sparkling blue dress. It caught what little light filtered down into the underground cavern, and reflections from the sparkles danced across the walls. They distracted the woman. She tried to follow the little shining lights with her fingers and smiled.

"Hello?" The sparkly woman tried to place a hand on the dead woman's shoulder. It passed straight through, making them both jump.

"What? Who? Who are you? What do you want?" the shade demanded.

The fairy godmother had a hand on her chest as though her heart were about to break through in panic. "We want to get across the river. Can you help us?"

"Tell me something beautiful," the shade demanded.

"Something... what?"

"Tell me something you remember. Tell me something beautiful."

The young woman looked around the cave, a place where there was nothing beautiful to focus on.

"The marble gorge in Taiwan," a voice sliced in, smooth and confident. The man who stepped into the shade's view was dressed in puffy, Arabian pants and a patched vest that showed off an over-supply of pectoral muscles. The woman in blue glared at him. "If you go into the gorge right at sunrise, that pink light just dances over the marble walls of the canyon. It's breathtaking!"

The shade closed her eyes and nodded slowly, breathing in the recollection. "It's like you're the only one in the world."

"Yeah! Just.. wait, what?" Aladdin wrinkled his forehead in confusion. "What was I talking about?"

"No matter," the shade responded. She smiled at the young woman in blue. "Give some stones to the ferryman. He'll take you and your friends across the river, but don't tell him that I told you. He hates me!"

The shade turned and ran away, taking the memory of the gorge with her. Sitting nestled in her memory now was something to make the cave a little less dark, a little less bleak. The man could always make new memories; her only recourse was to steal them.

In the distance, she could hear the long pole of the ferryman's boat hit the bank. The river splashed against the sides, and the shade crouched behind a large rock, watching the sun rise on the other side of the world.

* * *

On the streets of Portland, the White Knight rode her shining charger. The horse pawed nervously at the ground, whining and huffing. He'd grown unused to the weight on its back.

On the edge of her vision stood a pair of identical girls holding hands, watching her.

The Knight held a gleaming sword that reflected the moonlight. She stared down the three vampires in front of her who had come to sully her town.

Under the Knight's watchful, all-seeing eyes, the three intruders found themselves transformed, body and mind. They sat astride chargers bedecked in blood red regalia. All three held well-polished swords and and wore shining helms. The White Knight leveled her sword at them and charged.

* * *

The witch laughed. "You'll never manage to save her that way," she told Merlin as he struggled to see from under his hat. "You've only one task left, and you'll have to think of something a bit better if you want to clear the forest by sunrise."

Death was having a heck of a time wielding his scythe. "I mean, I know that this is what these things are for, but it's not like I ever really learned how to use one."

"Maybe if we'd just given up knowing who we are, this all would've been easier," suggested Robin Hood as he stared toward the tall tower on the eastern wing of the castle that they'd found on the other side of the river.

"What do you mean?" the fairy godmother asked, trying to slice bamboo with her wand. It wasn't working.

"When I went to see Catherine earlier," Robin Hood said, "she didn't really know who she was."

"Who did she think she was?" Merlin asked.

"Snow White, I think." Robin Hood broke one of the pieces of bamboo off in the middle. "She wasn't herself at all and kept asking who I was."

Aladdin, lazing three feet above them all on his carpet-for-one, looked out across the unending forest. "This isn't going to work, you know. I mean, there's no way we'll clear out all of the bamboo. Might as well give up." He saw no particular need to help. He didn't know the girl they were supposed to be helping. Heck, he and his buddy'd just been passing through when all this happened. Wrong place, wrong time.

Robin Hood glared up at him. "You may not have known Chloe, but some of us did. Nobody made you come along. You could've stayed home."

"And miss an adventure like this?" Aladdin stood up. "Never! This is amazing, although I probably won't be able to put it in my next book."

"Probably not," Death agreed.

The fairy godmother stamped her left foot and glared as hard as she could at Aladdin. "You have no idea what happened. All you care about is yourself and your next damned book!" The cheery attitude that usually surrounded Caitlyn was at a breaking point. The others who, admittedly, hadn't known her terribly long looked sideways at her. "What?" she asked. "He's a selfish, conceited, useless lump up there! I just wish..." She gripped the useless wand in right hand tighter . "Rrrgh!" With a hard snap, she brought her hand down and the frustration exploded from her in all directions, leveling the forest.

At the edge, the witch raised an eyebrow. "Someone's been needing to get that out," she observed and started laughing again.

Caitlyn, the fairy godmother, blushed.

* * *

In the tower, a princess awoke. She sat up and ran her fingers through her long, golden hair. Far below her window, she could see the stubbly remnants of the bamboo forest.

"Chloe!" Robin Hood called up to the tower. "Are you okay?"

Princess Chloe, the trapped remnants of Chloe Hancock's soul, leaned out of her window and called back. "Thank you. Thank you for waking me up. Thank you for freeing me." Leaning slightly further, she blew kisses to each one of them.

Far below, everyone watched as Chloe continued to lean and lean until she tumbled from the window. She opened her arms wide as they turned into wings. She transformed into a silky grey dove and flew away.

Caitlyn had nothing to say, nor did anyone else.

Eventually, Aladdin piped up. "So, who was that and how do we get home?"

* * *

In the city, the White Knight plunged her sword, blooming with flame, into the heart of one of her assailants. The enemy rolled several feet before bursting into flames and then ash. A hard glare at the other two was all that was necessary to convince them to turn and flee. Her work was done.

In the back of her mind, a quiet voice tugged her away from the city. There was far more for her to do, so many dangerous places to see.

 _I have a home for you, if you can find it,_ the voice said, and the White Knight followed its encouragement out of the city.

* * *

The next morning, as people awoke to find their homes back to the way they had been, nobody talked about the day before. Terrible and beautiful things had happened, but the human mind isn't ready to deal with it. Meet and Greet knew this and used what little influence they had over the ebbing remnants of unreality to hide the worst atrocities from the humans who had committed them. They'd eventually told their master about the Knight, and he had lured her from the city. The broken mind of a mage could wreak terrible damage. The Knight had no place there long term. There was simply too much that she might have messed up.

On Jack's back porch, Meet and Greet found two perfect apples and shared them for their breakfast.


	11. Justin and the Travelers

February 15, 2013

The weather forecaster that morning had mentioned that the daily drizzle would make 20 uninterrupted days of rain. Justin had forgotten to grab his somewhat more water resistant hoodie in his excitement out the door.

 _Interface- Meet friends downtown. PDX Library. They've got a present for you (well, for Apple). -Sonnenkind_

He'd never met her; she lived somewhere in Germany as far as he could figure out, but she was friends with 5M1L33 and Apple as well, so Justin figured she was on the level.

* * *

Waiting outside the library, Justin felt his jacket slowly grow heavier and heavier as it picked up more rain. He tried to stand under one of the overhangs from the classically-inspired architecture of the library, but apparently Greek architecture wasn't the best for keeping off the rain.

Halfway down the block, he spotted four seriously out-of-place people: a gigantic Hispanic guy in jeans and a hoodie (okay, he looked relatively normal except for the eight million scars all over him!), a tallish white underwear model of a man sporting a seriously jazzy haircut and wearing red and leather club wear, a mediterranean post-military kind of dude in a stretchy black net shirt and skin-tight harlequin-patterned slacks (where did he even buy those?), and an even-more-mediterranean-looking man in a teal parka that had been buttoned up against the rain. At least someone was sensible.

Clubber Guy stepped away from the group when he saw Justin. "Are you Interface?" he asked, tripping over the handle like it felt weird to say out loud.

"Yeah," Justin said with a nod. "How do you know?" Couldn't just get stuff from anyone and hand it over to Apple. That kind of thing needed to be legit.

"Sunny - Sonnenkind - sent us?" the guy asked.

On the level, then. "Okay. Do you have the thing she sent me?"

The guy nodded and handed over a small thumb drive with a little hand-painted picture of a sun. Justin took it, thanked him, and walked off before he did anything really embarrassing, like stare at the hot guy in a less-than-covert manner.

* * *

Apple thanked him for the thumb drive when he delivered it to her later that day. She thanked him with cake. Her thank yous were pretty much always the best.

"What's on it?" he asked, trying to look as though he wasn't dying of curiosity to know what the really pretty group of people had delivered through him. Okay, it was just the one guy. Well, and maybe the other one in the harlequin pants. He was having a hard time remembering what the guy he'd talked to had looked like, but he'd definitely been hot. Hadn't he?

"Not much. A friend in Europe wanted me to take a look at some files and see whether I could do anything with them."

She was hedging. She was totally hedging. "You mean Sonnenkind, right?" Justin asked, hoping the name drop would get him some info.

Apple just shrugged and smiled and gave him another piece of cake. She was going to try to make him forget through the cunning application of chocolate cake. Justin figured he'd let her get away with it this time.


	12. A Rumble of Change

February 22, 2014

Everyone needs to dream. Dreams are an integral part of living, a necessary part of existence. Without dreams, the mind wanders through the night, not settling or sorting. When we cease to dream, we cease to be ourselves.

News circled the city like vultures, waiting for its prey to finally die. The strange, the corrupt, the unknowable was laid bare for all to read if they only knew how to find it.

 _SE Portland, Yesterday, a 5-year-old child (name unreleased) was found in the backyard of his school. Authorities say the child had butchered the class' pet hamster. Another child in his class says she saw him slit the animal's throat and run its blood out over the ground before burning its little orange and white body. The student says she couldn't understand what he was saying when a supervisor found him ostensibly praying over the body of the poor animal. Teachers are unsure what incited the act of violence, but they're looking into possible causes. Parents of students at the Community School shouldn't worry for the safety of their children. Every precaution is being taken._

Eric cut the article from the paper and pasted it into the scrapbook he'd started keeping after Chloe's death. With single-minded fervor, he continued.

 _Downtown Portland, Three young men were caught in the city's underground network of tunnels last week. Witnesses say they've heard screams from the tunnels for years, but they've only recently been heard above ground. The boys state that they were following the sound of crying into the tunnel. They wanted to make sure everyone was okay. Police released them with warnings, but one officer who wished to remain anonymous says that while they were searching for the boys, he heard the sound of a ship pulling away from the harbor entrance that used to be accessible through the tunnels._

The cutting went above the first. He had his orders, and Eric meant to follow them.

 _Amtrak, A train has been seen the last few nights rolling into town right around midnight. The train makes a brief station stop before moving on. Locals in the area say they've never seen the train before._

After taking a few pictures of the clippings and saving them to his phone, Eric called the others to a meeting and suggested that they meet at the Hunter Cave. Felix mentioned that it was nice to hear from him; he'd worried when Eric had dropped off the grid.

"I'll let everyone know," Justin said over the phone, "but I have a few things to see to myself."

Eric ended the call. For a minute, he stared at the pictures in his phone. He sent the photos in an email and grabbed a jacket. The weather hadn't warmed up yet, and it had just started to drizzle.

* * *

"What happened to Aladdin and his friend?" Felix asked as he walked in the front door of the Hunter Cave.

Eric, sitting on the couch in the middle of the rather plush living room that Justin had set up, looked up. "Who?"

Right, Eric hadn't been in the forest. "Those two guys who were here a while ago. You remember one was an author and the other.." Felix shrugged. They'd actually never gotten the other guy's story. It wasn't uncommon for hunters to come and go, trying to find some place to settle.

"Oh," Eric replied. "He and the other guy moved on. Looks like Portland wasn't exactly the place for them."

Felix nodded. "Guess that just leaves you and me and Harold and Jeff?"

"And the kid."

"Oh! And Caitlyn and Madeline. Where'd ChopChop wind up?"

Eric shrugged. "I don't really have time to keep up with people who leave town, you know."

"Yeah, but we could've made sure she got wherever she was going okay."

"Ask the kid, then. He tends to know."

"So, what's the plan?" Felix asked. "Just you and me today?"

"I thought we might split up," Eric suggested. "There's weird stuff going on near downtown. Did you hear about the kids in the tunnels?"

"No." Felix leaned over the scrapbook Eric offered him. "I didn't even know the city had these tunnels."

"They're all over downtown. Supposedly they were used to transport alcohol during prohibition and to kidnap people to work on ships before that."

Felix nodded. "So what do you think is going on?"

"Not sure. Ghosts, maybe."

"Should we call Madeline?"

Eric shook his head. "No. She's busy. I'll check it out. You could look into the train, I guess."

"I'll call Caitlyn. She lives in the area."

Eric put his scrapbook of clippings on the shelf while Felix gathered up the few things they'd need. Felix sent Caitlyn a quick text and headed with Eric out to his bike. Together, they pedaled through SE Portland toward the downtown core.

* * *

On the cameras she'd installed to keep an eye on the front part of the store, Apple watched Justin let himself into the little house she'd refurbished into an electronics repair shop.

"Apple?" he called to the empty space.

"Yeah, coming!" She clicked a button on her desktop that opened the security wall between the shop and her workshop. "Come on in, Interface. I'm in the kitchen."

She heard Justin's light sneaker tread as he came through the workshop area back to the little living space she'd set up downstairs.

"Cold pizza?" Over her left shoulder, Apple offered him a slice, which he took. After shoving a couple more bottles of juice into the fridge, she turned and smiled at him. "So, what brings you to my side of town?"

"I think there's a problem at the Hunter Cave."

How could there be a problem? She'd designed that security system herself. "What do you mean?" Apple poured two cups of cold brewed coffee and sat herself at the worn green diner table she'd managed to haggle fifty bucks off of the year before.

"Nothing I can quite put my finger on, but there's something weird going on with the equipment."

"Nobody should be able to hack it," Apple insisted. "I mean unless it's me." She shoved her glasses up her nose and grinned.

Justin nodded then shrugged. "I might be overreacting."

"Probably not. Did you try _looking_ at it? I mean, with that weird whatever-it-is you guys do?"

"Of course. A good hard _look_ is usually my first reaction after meeting you, and that's kind of what I mean." Having polished off his piece of pizza, Justin reached for the cup of coffee. "It looks like someone was trying to get into the software your way, but maybe whoever it was couldn't actually manage it. Who'd be trying to magically crack in?"

Apple rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I'm not sure, but it's not a good sign." She ran through the list of people who'd be trying to hack into the Hunter Cave. Nobody knew they were even there, unless of course her resonance on the cameras had attracted attention.

"It couldn't..." Justin trailed off, not seeming to want to finish his question.

"Couldn't what?"

Visibly steeling himself, he asked, "It couldn't be Craig, could it?"

Apple took a deep breath and slowly let it out. It _was_ the obvious question to ask. "Technically, I guess it's possible. I could take a look and see whether it looks like his work — I've seen enough to know — but I really don't think so."

"Why?"

She shrugged and took a gulp of coffee that was a little too big then coughed spectacularly. After a minute of composing herself and trying to figure out what she was even going to say to that, she began. "I have no way to make you trust him. Heck, I probably shouldn't trust him, I guess, but I can just tell you that I do. He trusts me, too."

Justin raised his eyebrows.

"I have enough on him to convince his higher ups to bury him, and I don't mean that figuratively. If he didn't trust me, I can't imagine that he'd have ever told me some of the things he did. I also can't imagine that I'd still be alive."

"Stuff like..."

"I can't, Interface." Some things were going with her to the grave. The kid was nice and all, and it was cool meeting someone who was pretty much human and could do what he did, but that didn't mean she was about to spill all of Paul's secrets to him.

Justin nodded. "I get that you trust him, but I don't-"

* * *

The city of Portland, Oregon shook, which might actually be an understatement. It trembled in fear as the ground beneath it threatened to open its gaping maw and swallow it whole. The lights around the city shut down, knocked like dominoes one to the next, toppling the power grid until what was left fell to darkness.

When a city trips and falls, it isn't long before those who live beneath it begin to crawl out and stretch their legs in the night. In Portland's case, they emerged with fangs bared.

* * *

They'd been lucky, Eric figured. Everyone had made it to the cave before the earthquake hit, and there was no real structural damage to the house. Outside, the echo of growls and moans and howls rang through the air. It was only going to get worse. He turned to the few who were there: Caitlyn, Harold, and Felix.

The first house passed quietly, tensely. Eric paced, Harold cleaned weapons, and Caitlyn took video out the window of anything she could see. As the night wore on, however, Eric started to get antsy. His shoulders rose and fell; he did situps and pushups to burn off the feeling. Outside, the inhuman sounds grew slowly, a building soundtrack to the night.

"Do you hear that?" Eric finally asked, breaking an almost hour-long silence in the room.

Caitlyn peeked through the curtains into the night. "This is going to be so bad," she said.

"We can't fight against that," Eric insisted. Harold was cleaning his handgun at the table. "There's too much out there. We're losing the fight, guys!"

"What does Madeline have to say?" Felix asked.

"To heck with Madeline! She lost it after Eugene."

Harold raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

"How do you expect us to fight all of that, Harold?" he asked. "We need weapons and training. If we're going to make a real difference, we need to stop trying to do this by ourselves. It'll just get us killed, and what good will that be to anyone?"

"What are you proposing?" Felix was sitting in the chair by the window, half watching Eric and half watching the front lawn. The shadow of something crossed the grass but didn't get close enough for them to see distinctly.

"I know a group," Eric began in a rush. He'd been waiting. "They're small, but they have resources. They want to help; they wanna do the right thing, y'know? I've talked with them a bit since..." he dropped off. Everyone in the room shivered, and nobody would meet his eyes. "Well, you know. They've helped me get my head on straight. I've got focus again."

Harold looked sharply at him. "What are you saying, Eric?"

"I'm saying that we should talk to them."

"Who's this group you keep talking about?" Caitlyn piped up. "Do _they_ have a name?"

Before Eric could answer, they heard pounding footsteps out front. Felix pulled back the curtains completely.

By the light of the over-large moon that seemed to nearly fill the sky, they saw the source of the footsteps: a pair of identical young girls with straight black hair to their shoulders and matching green dresses were sprinting down the street, holding hands. A young blind woman in a yellow sweatshirt and dark glasses was pursuing them not far behind. Her white cane tap-tap-tapped back and forth across the pavement in front of the house.

"Should we invite her in?" Caitlyn asked. "She could get really hurt out there."

Felix started to open the door when someone approached the woman from behind. The man, possibly in his mid-forties with wrinkles that suggested a lifelong smoking habit, reached out to the woman. She placed a hand on his wrist and turned. For a moment, they stood perfectly still. As if in a dance, he leaned toward her neck, and before Felix could even yell out to her, the woman brought the cane around to whip across the vampire's head.

They struggled back and forth, the bloodsucker showing amazing speed, but she was there with him, step for step. The cane glowed a faint gold as she struck lashes across the creature's face and body.

Caitlyn pulled open the door, "We've got to help."

With a final blow, the woman cracked the vampire across the head. She turned at the sound of the door, then ran in the opposite direction.

The door stood open, and everyone was silent for a minute. Then, Eric once again broke the silence.

"We need help," Eric said. "One-on-one we're okay." Caitlyn closed the door again. "En masse, we'll be slaughtered."

* * *

"Seriously? How'm I even supposed to get in?" Gale asked over the phone that had, thanks to Apple, never actually gone down. "Didn't you put bans all over that place to try to keep the kid safe?"

"I can drop them," Apple replied over the slightly-fuzzy connection. "We just can't get into the cameras easily. Something weird's going on. Whatever caused the earthquake wasn't mundane."

"Yeah, tell me about it. Okay, I was thinking about heading to the club to check on Joseph, anyway."

"Thanks, Gale!" Justin called over the phone.

It wasn't that she didn't care what happened to the hunters who'd gone to see her months ago; it was just that hunters (at least the other ones she'd heard about) had a bad habit of reacting strongly when anyone around them did anything even slightly out of their norm.

As she took the little pill and snapped it in half, Gale wondered whether she was about to make a really big mistake. "Here goes nothing," she told nobody in particular and swallowed the chalky little half-moon down.

The world twisted and twirled beneath her feet, and Gale reached out to the counter to catch herself. From far away, someone giggled; it might have been her. She could feel herself start to topple sideways, and as always, instead of hitting the ground, she simply slipped right through.

It took several minutes before the people upstairs came to investigate the source of the disturbance downstairs.

"How'd she even get in there?" the ex-soldier (Harry?) asked, shining an over-bright light into her eyes.

After a few tries, she managed to blink open her eyes. "I can still hear you," Gale said, rather coherently she thought.

The other man, an average-sized guy with close-cropped brown hair and hard green eyes, glared angrily at her. "Then you can answer, witch. How'd you get in here?"

She couldn't stop the giggles that came out. "Witch? Really?" With great force of will, she reigned in most of them, but it was relatively impossible to do so entirely. "Am I going to be burnt at the stake? Shall I gather a pin or a bell or whatever it was you need to make sure you've got the right evil-doer?" Gale rolled her eyes and pulled herself up, dusting off the frayed jeans she'd opted for over the flowy skirt.. "Felix, call off your watchdog. Justin sent me to check on you all."

"It's okay, Eric. We know her," Felix said, his voice as calm and placating as it would be to an overactive puppy or skittish horse.

"Really?" The angry one narrowed his eyes. "You didn't tell me about her."

Quietly, Felix replied, "We didn't know where you were."

Eric's complexion went ashen, but he said nothing.

Together, they walked up the basement stairs into the living room. A young woman met them at the top, and Gale smiled at her. "Hello, Caitlyn."

"Hello, Gale," the woman replied. "You said Justin sent you. Is he okay?"

"Yes. He and Apple are safe at her place."

Eric watched her closely as she sat on the couch in the living room. "Anything exciting happen around here?"

They told her about the twins and the blind hunter they'd seen earlier. About an hour earlier, they'd fought off a vampire trying to feed on the next door neighbor. Through it all, Eric stared icily in her direction and said nothing.

Harold carried glasses of juice that had started going warm and offered them around. Slowly, the room grew quiet and awkward as Eric continued to glare.

"Well," Gale said after half an hour, "I guess I know what I came for. I'll let Apple know that everything's okay, but I've got places to go and things to do." She smiled her sweetest smile at Eric and popped the other half of her pill into her mouth. "If you'll just excuse me."

She rose clumsily from the couch and stretched for a moment.

"Have a lovely evening," Gale called on her way toward the basement. She pulled the door closed behind her as she stepped through the doorway and the gauntlet.


	13. Paying the Piper

February 23, 2013

Salem, Oregon

Madeline Jenns looked across the living room to the woman who was sitting on her grandmother's old couch. The woman kept running one of her thick, brown dreadlocks through her hands. Must be a nervous tic, Madeline decided as she carried a tray of two mugs and a large, cherry-red teapot into the living room.

They sat staring at one another over hot tea that fogged up Apple's thick-rimmed glasses, making her look more than usually owlish - wide-eyed and out of place. What was she doing there? Although Madeline respected Apple's work, they'd never really been friends. Madeline figured she was probably the only one - well, except for maybe Justin - who knew the extent of Apple's work for the hunters. The woman had probably single-handedly made Hunter Net safe again after what'd happened to Jenns and her fellows in Eugene.

Eight more minutes passed according to the table clock that was shaped like a cello (a high school graduation gift from the same grandmother). Finally, as she reached the bottom of her cup of tea, Apple started talking.

"There's something wrong in the Net," she started. "I mean, not exactly wrong, but kinda different I guess. Things are in flux, like they were last time."

"What last time?" Madeline asked. "You mean when Builder died?"

"No, not then." Apple waved away the suggestion. "That was just someone hacking you. The last time the Net felt like this, it killed a whole bunch of _us_ , others like me. Something, most of us call it the Storm, swept through everything. It knocked out connections, kinda broke the world, y'know. Anyone plugged in died." She paused a moment, visibly gathering herself, then continued. "The body can't live without the mind." Madeline didn't understand the wry smile.

"So you think something like that's happening again?"

"I don't know whether it's particularly like that or just something else strange and new and different and..." Apple looked around as if seeing things in the room would give her another boost on the adjectives. "...dangerous?"

Madeline swirled the end of her tea in the bottom of her cup. Her grandmother had once tried to teach her to read tea leaves, but she'd been an awful study - not that bagged tea left a lot of leaves to read, anyway.

"I don't want things to be like they were last time," Apple continued. "Nothing was safe again for a long time. Things kind of went to hell in a handbasket." After a moment of confused forehead wrinkling, she asked, "What even is a handbasket?"

"It's like a picnic basket, I think. I probably have one around here somewhere to pick blackberries with."

"Why not just use a plastic container?"

"I guess it seemed kind of romantic back when I first started going to school. I wanted to live like one of the March sisters from Little Women."

The look on Apple's face said the reference had gone right over her head.

"They lived in the 1800s," Madeline filled in. Staring down into her tea because she'd never really been good about talking about herself before anyway, she continued. "I want to make things safer. When you're in Portland, it's easy to ignore what's going on out there, but things are bad. Here in Salem, we only get the overflow of what's happening, but it's really bad in Eugene. People are going missing; the orchestra alone has lost two of their first chairs. Something's hunting the city still, and I think it's the same something or someone who killed Builder and the others. It's getting worse, too."

"So what do you propose we do about it?"

"We?" She hadn't expected Apple to throw her hat in with a bunch of Hunters. There were enough of them on Hunter Net who would just as happily shoot Apple and the other magic users who made up her kind as look at them, and Apple had to know that. She had practically a free pass to Hunter Net as one of its protectors. Madeline knew that Justin kept giving her access for some reason. "What's in it for you?"

"We want pretty similar things, you know. There are lots of us who'd like to see you all wiped off the face of the planet, too."

Madeline hadn't known. "Really?" She'd had no idea, but it made sense, given the vitriol some of her fellows felt for the magic types.

"Yeah. You're kind of a pain and have a bad habit of getting in the way when someone's trying to get something really important done."

"Like children." She'd often felt as though the hunters were simply bumping blind through the night.

"Not exactly," Apple offered, "but the analogy's not completely wrong. It's just that so many of you seem to have these kind of naive views of what's out there and what it all means. You don't really seem to live long enough to get fully-formed experiences."

"Not surprising."

They sat in silence for a few minutes, remembering fallen comrades. Finally, Apple spoke again. "I think I can get him to come out."

"Who?"

"Trajan."

"You mean the guy who hacked Hunter Net and sent us south last time?"

"Yeah, the guy who called the attack on you and your friends."

"How?"

Apple smiled brilliantly. "Using his own tricks against him. He used the internet to convince you the ideas were coming from Hunter Net." She shrugged. "Two can play at that game."

* * *

"We're going on a recon mission," Madeline said over the phone. "I promise we'll be careful. Something's shaking up in Eugene. I'm thinking about heading down in a couple days, maybe early next week."

On the other end, Felix sounded uncomfortable. Madeline was even more thankful that she'd decided to do the heads up over the phone instead of in person. He'd never have let her go without him, and this needed to be just her. None of the others had been there the last time, except for Eric, and nobody really knew where he was. Sure, the others were part of the war, but this was her battle.

The conversation ended awkwardly with Felix trying to get himself invited on the dangerous mission while simultaneously telling them that he'd be on high alert if they needed anything while they were down there.

"Everything'll be fine, Felix," she said and looked across the room at Apple. "Don't worry about me. I'll be fine."


	14. Judith Leister

February 24, 2013

Eugene, Oregon

As it turned out, Judith had been called for a reason.

The world was crumbling, falling into little bits and pieces. All those people who'd said the end was far away, perhaps centuries or even millennia hence, had been wrong. The old man on the corner with his grizzled beard and electric blue eyes who had been screaming about the end times with his handmade cardboard sign had seen and known what nobody else was willing to see and know.

It snuck up on you, she decided as she pulled on a long, flowing white dress and large wooden crucifix. Armageddon didn't look how she'd thought it might. The sun had risen just as it had the day before and the one before that. The grass was green, the birds sung, and the tea she drank tasted much the same, except that this morning she'd added sweetened condensed milk. Small luxuries could be accommodated during the end of the world.

Judith drank her tea and ate a final piece of toast. That day, she wrote cards and letters to loved ones, telling them how much they meant to her. Nobody knew what the end would look like, so she thought she'd pop them into the mail just in case she'd gotten the date wrong. There was really no problem with telling people close to you how much they mattered, even if it wasn't the last day. Judith knew enough not to give in to the hubris of assuming she was absolutely correct about everything.

Late in the day, as the sun stained the sky a brilliant orange, Judith left her little apartment near the University of Oregon in Eugene. She slid the half dozen letters into the mailbox on her way through what passed for a lobby in her building. On the way out, she wished the part-time doorman (a local phsyics student trying to pay down a mountain of ever-accumulating debt) a good evening. She'd have to hurry if she was going to make it to the campus on time.

She thought, however, that it was perhaps not going to be a problem if she was late. Could this part start without her? Her dreams suggested that it could not, but best not to tempt fate.

Judith quickened her pace.

* * *

A demon stood in the middle of the university quadrangle, his hands wrapped around the throat of a young blond woman. The woman had been sent as an emissary. She could do the work that needed to be done. It was her destiny, of that Judith was sure.

However, before Judith could reach out her hand to give the woman the Lord's touch, before the words she'd known in her heart came to fruition in the air around her, the blonde's eyes began to glow. Golden fire sprang forth from the other woman's fingers and eyes and mouth and nostrils to envelop the demon. It locked them together in the Martyr's Embrace as the woman gave everything she was to bind him to her.

For millennia, human beings had fought for their own safety. They fought wind and rain and elements beyond their control. At point, they began to fight forces that could only have come from Hell itself. Judith raised her voice in exaltation. She let herself be taken by the holy energy that ran through the blond and her quarry. She'd hoped to be able to do on her own what this angel had already begun. If she could not start it, she would help the other to finish the work.

Judith barely felt her feet pass over the grass as she ran to the pair so thoroughly locked together. The glow, the holy light of Judgment and Redemption, warmed its way through her fingers and arms and slowly to her chest as she stepped within its circle.

The blond looked over at Judith, fearful but determined. "What are you doing? It'll kill you!"

"Let me help." Judith smiled and placed a hand on the woman's shoulder. "I am willing to give what is asked of me, just as you are."

The woman nodded, and Judith placed her other hand on the demon. Raising her voice to the heavens, she called out, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the Earth?"

A moment of intense silence passed as Heaven itself built up to rain judgment on those who had earned it. Judith felt the hand of God descend lovingly upon her before the growing energy exploded from the trio in all directions.

As she passed, one with everything in that moment of fire and peace, Judith watched the holy light worm its way into the demon, into its blood, and spread to all his infernal children. Across the city, demons and monsters perished, and it was good.


	15. Out of Our Dreams

February 24, 2013

Early in the evening on the twenty-fourth, 5M1L33 logged onto her computer and pulled up the list of Hunter Net favorite pages she checked to keep up with friends, contacts, and informants. GingerPrincess had posted a new dream vlog. 5M1L33 collected anything she could about dreams and had started trawling for videos a while ago. Something weird was going on with dreams all over the place, and she wanted to know what. It might be exciting. It might be useful. It was almost certainly something that everyone deserved to know.

GingerPrincess's first description was that in her dream, Jenns - the ersatz leader of the Hunter collective in Oregon - looked a lot younger. She was pretty, too, like the weight of the world wasn't currently sitting on her steady-but-really-too-young-for-that-kinda-thing shoulders. Princess didn't recognize the place; she said that there were red brick buildings everywhere and lots of grass. It was pretty, too.

From somewhere behind her point of view, someone screamed, and swarms of monsters poured out of the ground, literally. Manhole covers popped up and out came gross things of the worst descriptions. In fact, Princess didn't really bother trying to describe them. That was okay. 5M1L33 had a whole folder of pictures she'd collected that could probably fill in the blanks. Princess said that when she tried to write the things down in a journal or start recording the vlog about it, she realized that she had no words for what they'd looked like. The closest approximation might be just to say that they looked like nightmares.

The _things_ attacked Jenns and her friends, who were trying desperately to find some kind of escape. Obviously they'd been ill-prepared.

Princess finished off the dream vlog she'd started keeping after the Dark Forest by asking anyone who watched it to not share it too widely. The series wasn't really something she could post on YouTube, but she'd updated it pretty consistently on Hunter Net. 5M1L33 sent her a quick thanks and added the video to her cloud file and local hard disc of dream-related material.

* * *

Justin picked up the phone on the third ring. His ID identified the caller as Caitlyn. He'd have to show her how to set her phone up to block ID.

"What is it, Caitlyn?"

"I had a weird dream."

She always was one to get right to the point. Justin usually found it a little hard to keep up with her. "What kind of weird dream?" he asked cautiously.

"Something about Madeline and some vampires and something. I think it was like a memory or something. It didn't look current."

Justin blinked once. "That's both impossible and highly likely."

"Why?"

"Because I think I had the exact same dream, and so did Harold and Felix. They both called me to check in this morning and see whether I'd heard from Apple or Jenns."

"Well, have you?" Caitlyn asked with a definite clip to the end of her voice.

"No."

"Should we go check on them?"

Justin thought about it. Getting to Salem would be a pain. He'd already tried calling Madeline's cell phone, but for the first time ever, she wasn't picking up. It wasn't exactly the best sign ever. Finally, he suggested that they get together and try to get into Apple's workshop as _she_ wasn't answering, either. That kinda freaked Justin out a lot more, and he'd been planning to go check on her when his phone stopped ringing off the figurative hook. Who had a landline anymore anyway?

"I'll send you directions to Apple's house."

Caitlyn agreed and hung up.

Getting in was going to be a lot harder with Apple gone.

* * *

Apple's little house-shop was just as it had always been: small, blue, and impenetrable.

"How are we supposed to get in?"

"There's got to be a key or something around here, right Justin?" Harold asked, looking at him.

"Maybe?"

Felix was impatient. "I could break the window. We could probably get in that way. If something bad happened, we need to know!" He paced back and forth. Justin was reminded of the caged black bear he'd once seen in a zoo when he was seven, before his first internet connection.

"I don't think that breaking a window is going to help," Harold ventured. "Apple seems like the kind of person who'd have advanced security measures, Felix."

Felix, the resident actually-paid-for-his-tech guy, apparently couldn't just ignore the obvious. "How're we going to get in, then?"

"Maybe she left a key somewhere in case she gets locked out," Caitlyn suggested. "I have one in a plant near the front door of my apartment building. If anyone found it, they'd have no idea which apartment it goes to."

"Do you get locked out a lot?" Justin asked her.

"No, but my video equipment is kind of expensive and heavy, so I don't ever want to be stranded with it."

It was a good point. Justin thought he might consider putting a key somewhere outside the Hunter Cave when he got back there. He could code up a fingerprint lock pretty easily to keep it safe.

The four of them spread out to look for the elusive and possibly non-existent key. As luck would have it, though, it seemed that Caitlyn and Apple had been cut from something of the same cloth. After nearly ten minutes of looking, the videographer found a spare key under a loose brick near the left side of the house. "Told you there'd be one," she boasted and pushed it into the front door lock.

Inside was another matter. The messy-as-usual front room was cut off from the workshop, and Apple'd turned on all the locks and security passes before leaving. They wandered around in the little front room that was full of half-working computers and old gaming systems, trying desperately to find a way into the back workshop.

"This is a waste of time," Harold insisted.

"I'm sorry, but can I help?" a disembodied Apple's voice asked.

Justin jumped and tried to pretend that he hadn't. When he looked over a Felix, he got the feeling that the other man had done the same.

"Who's there?" Felix asked, although the answer seemed to be entirely obvious.

"My name is Apple. Can I help?"

"My name is Interface or Justin Stevenson," Justin began. "We're looking for Apple, and she's… you're not answering any of your texts. Are you the actual Apple or..?" He wasn't really sure what else she'd be but didn't quite want to admit that. "We're just trying to make sure that everything is okay," he added, hoping that it'd smooth the way.

An projection of Apple in short denim cutoffs and a blue and green flannel shirt appeared sitting on the counter. "I'm sorry, Justin, but I think that means that something's happened. If I'm not answering any of my devices, something must have gone wrong."

"What could have gone wrong?" Felix asked.

"I don't know. I'm a download from several days ago, and I think whatever it was must have been planned after I was downloaded."

"You're a what?" Harold finally piped up. Caitlyn just seemed to be sitting there with her mouth open.

"I'm a backup of Apple."

"Of Apple's what?" Felix asked.

"Just of Apple."

Justin laughed. Leave it to her to come up with something like that. It was amazing. "Can we get into the back to take a look. Maybe something back there can tell us or show us what happened."

"Yeah," Apple said. "I'd be completely okay with that."

The sealed door into the back room swung open, and the four of them walked through it.

* * *

Apparently Harold had more pull with the local military installation than anyone had actually known, Justin mused. He found himself sitting in the back of a 4x4 Jeep, blitzing through the downtown of a city that had outlawed such acts. The police cars that wandered past were quiet and let them pass. That might have had more to do with Felix's friend at the precinct, though.

"Were you able to identify which building it was?" Harold yelled from the front of the Jeep.

Caitlyn, madly mashing buttons on her phone (she really needed a proper touchscreen!), replied that she hadn't yet, but she'd be able to figure it out by the time they reached the city limits.

Justin leaned back and tried not to worry. If Apple was there, everything was going to be okay. She knew what she was doing. He checked the countdown on his phone. Thirty minutes to sunset and at least an hour until they got to Eugene, assuming they broke every speeding law known to the state of Oregon.

* * *

The central quad of the University of Oregon in Eugene was usually an idyllic, verdant place where the student population gathered to play guitars or pretend they were studying.

Justin and his friends found scorched grass in a ring, the center of which had a cross with arms more than ten feet long in each direction burnt into it.

Caitlyn knelt in the middle of the scorch, and Justin watched her start crying. Tears slid quietly down her cheeks, punctuated by the occasional sniffle. "What happened here?"

"I don't know," he said, "but I might be able to find out."


	16. Finding Some Answers

February 24th, 2013 (Nearly Midnight)

Paul Craig paced back and forth in his too-clean living room. The four people who'd shown up at his house long past acceptable visiting hours hadn't exactly brought the best news with them. The kid had a USB in his hand and was offering it to Paul as proof.

"Take a look if you like," Justin said.

Paul took the thumb drive and walked over to the ports by the living room lightswitch. He plugged the drive into the top port and walked back to the glass table. The video Justin had brought played there in silent, wrenching black and white.

He watched the glow fill the video, whiting out everything there. It swallowed up Madeline and the vampire known as Trajan and Judith Leister, a member of the Celestial Chorus whom Paul'd only just learned lived near the university campus.

When the scene came back, Madeline Jenns, Trajan, and Judith Leister were gone, completely. Apple, however, was not. She'd been standing motionless at the edge of the green. Paul knew that look on her face. It was her loss face that only came out when some kind of horrible atrocity had been committed. He'd seen it four years earlier after the Storm. His side had claimed it as a victory; Paul'd rather thought that it came at too high a price. He'd only just started seeing Apple before that, but the Week of Nightmares sealed the deal for him, as much as anything had.

What he hadn't expected to see right after the magical light show on the screen, especially since he'd hadn't been informed that the event had happened, was the approach of three black-clad Agents. He had a sinking feeling that his finely balanced facade of disinterest had been blown.

"We need to find out where they took her," he said as the video ended. She hadn't even fought. Why hadn't she fought them? "I have a few places we can look first." Paul tried to keep things partitioned, compartmentalized. Things just worked better when he kept his eye on what was really important. "I think it would be best to meet again tomorrow. If they've taken her somewhere secure, which is most likely, it'll take some time to find our way in."

The others looked at him. Obviously, they'd expected some kind of reaction, but Paul couldn't afford to give them one.

"Does that mean that you're going to help us?" Justin asked him after a moment's silence. "I thought those were your people."

Paul cleared his throat. What could he say to that? Yes, those are my people. I've been working for them for as long as I can remember. It was true; he had no memories outside of those he'd forged while working for the Technocracy. Did that make him less of a person?

No, self-pity wouldn't do at all. He had no time for it. "Yes, I'm going to help you find her." What else could he say?

He said good-bye as the others headed home. They almost cheerily made plans to meet the next day. Everyone seemed completely sure that things were going to work out, that they were going to figure it all out. Everyone was kidding themselves, Paul thought. If things hadn't been so important, he'd have drowned his sorrows in the bottle of artisanal gin he'd bought for Apple's birthday. Hopefully, he'd still have the chance to give it to her.

* * *

February 25th, 2013 (Just after 3 AM)

Sleep wasn't going to be his friend that night. Gale was still out of town dealing with… whatever it was she'd gone to deal with. She'd been gone almost a week; even Apple hadn't been able or willing to tell him where the Ecstatic had gone.

The sun was still firmly below the horizon when Paul tied on his sneakers and left the house.

Miles disappeared beneath his feet as he tried to open his head and find some clarity. Paul found himself winding down the hill that led from his house into the city. As he neared the bottom, sweat poured down his face, and his knees were screaming from the constant descent, but he noticed none of it.

Agent Craig wound his way through downtown to the southwest core, still lit this late at night. At 4:12, he strode through the front door of Sorrow Verdes, hoping to find Gale.

The few remaining patrons and the cooler-than-thou bartender looked at him with disdain.

Paul made a beeline for the bar. "Is Gale here?"

The bartender had asymmetrically cut, straight hair and nearly-invisible, wire-framed glasses that masked some of the freckles around her eyes she probably wasn't terribly fond of. She looked Paul over once before deciding she'd deign to give him an answer, although he assumed it was only out of sheer boredom. "Not here."

Trying to keep his cool, Paul let out a slow breath. "What about Joseph?"

"Does he know you?"

"I'm a friend of Gale's." White lies wouldn't hurt too much, right? I mean, it was almost true. Apple was Gale's friend, and he…well, it was close enough.

"But do you know Mr. Valle?"

This was getting him nowhere. Paul reached into the running belt he'd grabbed on the way out the door. He pulled out his cell phone and laid it face up on the counter. The low, hypnotic beats that resonated out attracted little-to-no attention, although the bartender seemed a bit more keen. Looking up from the phone, he said, "I need to speak with Mr. Valle. Can you take me to him?"

The fog that passed over the bartender's eyes would've been imperceptible to just about anyone else, Paul was sure. She pointed toward a door on the side of room. "His office is through there." Her voice was a bit flat, perhaps, but that was okay.

Paul turned off the phone and slid it back into the running belt. "Thank you."

As he got close, he heard the latch for the door click and pushed it open. He'd expected an office, maybe plush carpet and candelabras with candles in them if Joseph Valle was as traditional as he seemed.

Instead, he found cement floor and an incongruous oak desk near the door. The back half of the room was perhaps meant to be extra storage or space for overstock. However, as he got closer and his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Paul saw that the back half of the office had only one thing in it: a very slim, dark-haired man who looked to be in his early twenties chained to the wall. "Joseph Valle."

The usually so-well-kempt man looked wild to Paul. His hair was mussed, not its typical, smoothly oiled self. Joseph looked everywhere, from time to time managing to focus on Paul, at other times just on the juncture between his shoulder and neck. There was no lucidity there.

Paul pulled out his cell phone again and placed it on the floor near Valle's feet. "I don't know how you ended up there, but we're going to have a chat, Mr. Valle." The vampire was not listening. Paul turned on the same audio clip he'd played for the bartender and set it to loop. "You're going to tell me everything you've gathered on the New World Order and their local work, and I'm not going to kill you for being a Reality Deviant. When we're done, if you're very helpful, I might even let you out of those chains."

* * *

February 25th, 2013, 7:15 AM

Nobody'd really slept. They sat around the table in Apple's workshop, still arguing over the best course of action. Felix was in the process of brewing their third liter of coffee that morning.

"It's really not our place to get in the middle of," Harold said. "I understand that Apple's your friend, Justin, and I _do_ want to help, but I don't see how it's our fight."

"Jenns died for that fight," Felix reminded him. "How is that not somehow now our battle?"

"Apple's Consciousness," Justin called. It took only a moment for the holoprojection (at least, he figured that was what it was) to walk into the room. "What can you tell us about the Technocrats in the area."

Apple's projection sat cross-legged on the floor. The light of the projection (which Justin still couldn't manage to trace) seemed to reflect off her projected glasses. "Well, the main operative in the area is Paul Craig, an undercover agent for the New World Order."

"Yes, we know that, but there have to be others," Justin pressed.

"I still really don't see why this is our fight," Harold repeated.

Caitlyn gave him a withering look. "The whole thing's our fight, right? If we're not willing to help out the people we call friends, why are we willing to help out total strangers?"

Harold pressed the argument. "I just think that it's bigger than us."

"Of course it is," Felix replied. "I think that's the whole point."

"Apple," Justin continued, "are there others in the area?"

"Yes. There's a base near Mount Saint Helens. I don't think that they know that I know where it is. I mean, if they did, I probably would've been taken a lot earlier than this."

"Can you give me the schematics?"

"No, I can't. However, that USB you received for me a while ago probably has some interesting things on it. I've been trying to figure out how to get it into their systems from a distance, but it hasn't been working. If you go there, take it with you. The program on it is… explosive to say the least." Apple pointed to the original NES sitting on a shelf behind one of the computer monitors.

Justin walked back to the gaming system. He lifted up the slot for the cartridge and laughed. Inside was a small lockbox with a fingerprint lock on it. He pressed his thumb to the lock. "I don't want to know how you got my thumbprint," he told the projection as he pulled out the USB stick with a picture of a little smiling sun on it. Apple's must've draw the smile with a sharpie after she got it from him.

Harold wasn't convinced. "How do we know she's even in the base at Mount Saint Helens?"

"Technically?" Justin asked, looking back at the group of friends he'd cultivated over the last six months. "We don't, but let me put it this way for you. I'm going. If there's even a possibility that she's there or that they know where she is, I'm going. Even if she's not there, I'm taking this there and letting the whole lot of 'em fry." He held up the USB. Sure, he had no real idea what was on it, but if it came from Sunny and Apple had had anything to do with it, he was sold.

Caitlyn looked excited for the first time in months. She'd been shaken up pretty badly by what had happened when Chloe was killed, but she suddenly looked ready to take on the world. "Let's do it. I'll go with you. It's not like there's that much left to lose, and it's the right thing to do, right? Isn't that what we're about?" she asked with a pointed look at Harold.

Justin smiled at her and nodded.

The four of them left the little house. They had a meeting arranged with Paul Craig in less than an hour on the other side of town. Maybe he'd found something useful. Who knew?


	17. Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

February 25, 2013

"This wasn't what I thought you had in mind, Craig!" Harold bellowed from the doorway.

Paul looked up at the ex-army loudmouth who had no idea what he was talking about. "What did you think I had in mind then?" He held the phone close to Valle's ear, hoping to open up those last little pockets of his mind before giving the whole enterprise up for lost. The vampire had fallen into a coma-like sleep when the sun rose, but something seemed to keep rocking him out of his stupor.

The four hunters filed into the room with looks that suggested varying degrees of disgust at whatever it was Paul was supposed to have done.

"I thought you were asking him questions," Harold continued, crossing his arms tightly over his chest in what looked like a well-practiced military stare of displeased judgement.

"I am."

Felix looked back and forth between the two of them. "What about the chains?"

Paul shrugged. "Seemed like a good idea. Whoever put him in those-"

"You really expect us to believe that?" Harold cut him off. "We walk in that door, and you're doing..." He waved his hand in circles as though it would stir a description up in his memory for what they'd 'found' Paul doing. "You're doing something to his mind. I don't know what."

Huh. Interesting. Paul knew that if he'd had more time, he'd have pushed harder for how Harold had known. Did Hunters have some kind of Mass Resonance Scanning ability? Maybe. "He doesn't know anything, anyway. I've been questioning him for hours."

Valle jolted awake, that same mad look gleaming in eyes that seemed to be slowly turning red. "Go. Must go." He struggled against the chains in the wall, putting whatever he had left into it. It wasn't much, though, and the chains held firmly.

Caitlyn looked worried. "Is he safe? What's going on, Agent Craig?"

"I have no idea why he's in chains. He was like this when I walked in."

Harold gave another huff of disbelief.

"Valle can't tell me anything useful," Paul continued. "He's too mentally gone."

The kid pulled up his hood and stared at Valle, who was slowly sliding back to sleep. "There's something messing with his head."

"Yeah, the Techno-Magic Guy!" Harold insisted. "Haven't you been listening, Justin?"

"Yes. I mean, no. I mean there's something else in there, too. There's something in there like calling him or something." He looked up at Paul for a moment. For his part, Paul didn't like the sensation of whatever the kid was doing to him. After four or five seconds, Justin pushed the hood back and the feeling ebbed away. "We're going after Apple," he said.

"Where? When? What did you find out?" Paul squashed the desire to kick the vampire for having obviously been less useful than whatever the group of hunters had found. He tried to push fingers through his hair, but they caught in knots and tangles of dried sweat before they could work their way out. Paul winced.

"There's a bunker built into the slopes of Mount Saint Helens," Caitlyn informed him. "Either she's in there or there's something we can learn from it."

"What kind of bunker?"

"Your kind," Harold interjected.

Paul tried not to laugh. The bastards had never even told him it was there. So much for mutual trust and mutual gain. The closest outlet he'd known about was the arm of the Guiding Hand in Tacoma that had picked up Ben-Ami and sent agents for Eric Hancock and the cop, Mark Glass. "I have a Jeep that can get us out of town if you need it. Should do the trick if you don't want to borrow the one from the army again."

Harold narrowed his eyes, but eventually nodded his approval. "Fine."

"Meet at my house in three hours. I'll see what I can dig up in that time."

Justin looked at the vampire chained to the wall. "Are you really going to just leave him like that? Don't you think we should let him go or something?"

Paul shrugged. "Honestly, I found him this way. Maybe it was what he wanted."

As if on cue, Valle jumped and tore open his eyes. He looked wildly at each of them and then to the back door that led to the alley. "Out. Out." He strained in vain against the heavy link chains.

"If we make it back again tonight and he's still here, I'll let him go."

Justin nodded resolutely. "If you free him now, he'll probably just run outside."

"And sunshine was never any vampire's friend."

* * *

Justin looked around the Hunter Cave to make sure he had everything. He wasn't the fighting type, never had been. Now, he was planning to put it all on the line for a woman who wouldn't even tell him her real name.

He grabbed a small tactical waist pack that Harold had left there once. In it, Justin tucked the USB he'd taken from Apple's house and the cell phone and earpiece he'd need to keep in contact with the consciousness that was all he had left of his friend. For now, at least.

As he left the house, Justin figured he'd at least call Jeff and see whether he was awake yet. A little more military wasn't going to be a bad thing on a mission like this one.

* * *

Felix called the only two contacts he had left in the city to let them both know what was up.

"What is it, Felix? Things are going to hell down here," Catherine said by way of an answer.

"Yeah, I get that." Definitely a conversation to keep brief. "Try to keep things in line for a while, okay? I might be gone for a little bit. Just didn't want you to worry if you tried to call."

"Sure," she replied, distraction clear even over the phone. "Be careful with whatever it is you're going to do."

"We will." He hung up. Huh, maybe the call to his friendly, neighborhood werewolf would go better.

* * *

Caitlyn had nothing to take. As she looked around the over-priced shoebox she'd come to call home, she fully realized the truth that she had nothing to keep herself alive. Maybe Harold had an extra gun or something.

Gathering up her phone and minicam, she walked out. On the landing, Caitlyn made sure to lock the door properly. She might not have anything to keep her alive, but that was still her stuff, and it was all she had left, damn it.

* * *

Harold called in one last favor.

* * *

Jeff slept late. He had ever since retirement, but there was no way he was going to let that get in the way of some serious ass-kicking where said ass-kicking was due.

After hanging up on Justin, the old man pulled the shotgun out from its place of honor in the front closet, barely hidden behind a long winter jacket. It'd do, he decided.

* * *

Paul Craig stood in front of the left half of his IKEA closet. With the doors flung open, it was even easier to see the arsenal he'd amassed over the years. Some had come from the NWO while others had been obtained privately. Few would be helpful on the mountain.

He pulled the kevlar vest off a hanger and strapped it on. It'd limit his mobility, but he was really far more worried about bullets than bending. Paul filled the black tactical bag with a dozen weapons of uncertain usefulness. He strapped a pistol to each thigh.

They were going to get Apple back. It wasn't a question. They were going to find her and to hell with anyone who got in their way.

Paul wasn't a religious man; he never had been. He'd heard about guys going into fights and deciding to pray in the last calm, just in case. Maybe he'd earn some points with whatever Creator was out there watching them. Paul wasn't the type.

He set up the on the vest's voice commands to turn the proximity boosters on.

With nothing left to do and an hour to do it in, he opted to make sandwiches instead of pray. Prayer might fall on deaf ears, but those sandwiches would definitely end up in some empty stomachs, and that was enough for him.


	18. In the Bunker

February 25, 2013

She'd expected it to be better hidden, really. After the long drive up the mountain, Caitlyn had thought they'd find the front door to the bunker nearly invisible in camouflage or something. Instead, the entrance stuck out like some post-apocalyptic sore thumb. Two large, green steel doors were locked together with a corroded but high-tech looking scanner lock. "What does it need?" she asked.

Paul Craig took off his glove. "With any luck, a fingerprint and voice scan. If they're not too on-the-ball today, we might just be able to manage this and keep our skins." He laid his hand across the right-hand metal door. Light glowed behind the pads of his fingers. "Agent Paul Craig, New World Order, Grey Number 3917382 and guests."

Something inside the door clicked. "Welcome, Agent Craig."

Caitlyn took a picture. If she ever got home, 5M1L33 was going to have a field day.

The doors slid up, showing a bright white mesh of light for them to walk through into the bunker.

"What's that?" Jeff asked. He'd slept most of the way up, and Caitlyn would've been surprised if the old man even had a clear idea of where they were.

"It's a scan-net. It'll take your particulars so we can't sneak in extra people and so you don't wander off somewhere you're not allowed."

Justin nodded.

Heroes do heroic things, even if they're not real heroes. Caitlyn tucked away the little camera she had and set her shoulders. "I'll go first if nobody else wants to." For the long moment it took for her to walk through the group, Caitlyn felt strong and brave. She only hoped the feeling would last.

The mesh felt like nothing particular, like light. There was nothing to it. No cold or prickles or even an eerie wave of discomfort crawling up her spine. Just nothing. On the far side, she could see a long, narrow hallway of the same greenish grey metal mixed and heavy concrete with doors and maybe hallways branching off.

Paul stepped past her into the hallway and motioned for everyone to follow him.

A door to the right about ten feet down the hallway opened, and another agent stepped out. He wore the ubiquitous dark glasses, black suit, and tie that Caitlyn had come to connect with these creeps.

"Agent Craig?" the other agent asked, holding up a hand if it that would stop them.

Paul paused and reached into his jacket. "Yes, Agent Paul Craig. I've been stationed-"

"I know where you're stationed, Agent. We keep an eye on everyone in the area."

"Well, then," Paul pressed on, "lovely of you to come introduce yourselves." He pulled a folded leather ID wallet from his jacket and offered it to the other Agent.

"Our existence was determined to be need-to-know, Agent Craig," the other said, looking over the piece of identification without taking off the glasses. "Who are these other three with you?"

That was it, wasn't it? How was he going to explain their presence? Wait, three? Caitlyn looked back to see who was missing. She counted four, although Justin was doing his best to shrink into one of the corners with his hood up. Weird.

"These are colleagues," Paul lied without missing a beat. Either he couldn't count, or he had one hell of a poker face. Caitlyn was betting on the latter, which was not entirely comforting.

It was never going to work. Even as she watched the Agent mull over what to say to Paul's obvious prevarication, Caitlyn was sure that it was never going to work. She hadn't done it much before, but Caitlyn knew that the magic in her fairytale wand had come from somewhere. Hadn't it? Anxiousness writhed deep in her belly, and she let it roll up and through her.

"Just back off!" she said, bringing a finger down to point at the Agent just as she had with the wand in the bamboo forest. Again, something rushed up and through her like a ring of sunshine bursting out. It threw the Agent backward into the room along with Paul. The other three seemed unaffected by it.

She could hear the two magicians in the guard room screaming at one another.

"What the fuck are those?!" the one agent yelled.

They heard the wet thud of a fist connecting with someone's face, and then Paul emerged. "We don't have a lot of time," he said, standing at the edge of whatever it was Caitlyn had done. "Can you turn that off?"

She looked around herself and then closed her eyes. With a force of will she hadn't known she'd had, Caitlyn pulled the thing back into herself and held it there. They were going to make it out of this alive if she had anything to do with it.

* * *

Two more Agents later, Justin emerged from hiding to take a real look around the computer room. He pulled a small bluetooth earpiece from his pocket and stuck it into his left ear. "Leave me here," he said without looking at the others. "I'll try to see what I can do to help, but I've also got a couple of things to do for Apple."

"Now wait a minute," Jeff started, and Justin turned to look at him. "Why are we going to just leave you here all by your lonesome? That seems like about the worst idea I've heard yet."

"I tend to agree," Harold put in. "You're not really a fighter. What if someone comes in and finds you here?"

"No. I can do this. If anyone comes, they won't be able to find me," Justin insisted.

Paul asked, "Well, can I help?"

"No," Justin turned to look at him. The man was a wreck. "They already know we're here. It's not like those last two fights were quiet. The best thing you can do is continue to work your way through the bunker while I mess stuff up for them here. You know these guys and what they'd capable of a lot better than we do."

Paul nodded. He pulled one of his pistols from a holster and offered it to Justin. "Keep yourself safe."

Justin took it and tucked it into the pocket of his hoodie. He didn't even know exactly how to turn off the safety, but Paul didn't need to know that. "I will. Now go."

The others filed out quietly, Paul in front.

Justin approached the terminal and watched it hum to life beneath his fingers. In the bluetooth in his ear, he could hear Apple's consciousness talking him through the operating system. "It needs a key to log you in. Take the microSD card I gave you and insert it into the left terminal." Justin did as he was told. The computer fired up, seeming to think about what it wanted to do before unlocking.

In his ear, Justin was aware of Apple muttering to herself. "Wow, cold shoulder much? What a piece of work." Justin figured it was better not to ask. After another minute, the screen filled with video feeds from down the hallways. He zoomed in on one of the ones that looked like a cafeteria and watched in horror as two agents turned and opened fire on the rest of the team.

"Isn't there something we can do?" he asked the voice in his ear.

"Not from out here, Interface. Just keep an eye on what's going down. We're after a bigger fish. Your friends can deal with the little guppies."

Justin scanned the other rooms and noticed one of the doors across the hall had two more agents on the other side. It took a little figuring, but he managed to lock the door from the outside and trap them in. "That'll help at least. What's wrong with their guns?" he asked as something bright and glowy shot from one of the handguns an agent was unloading at the team.

"I don't know," Apple replied. "I've never seen anything like it. I'll see whether I can download the central databases. We're not going to have a lot of time once you set that thing in your pocket off. They'll figure out what's going to happen."

Justin pulled the thumbdrive from his pocket and stared at it. "What is going to happen?"

"They're going to realize that we know a lot more than they think we do."

"Who does?" He was met by silence. Apparently even projections kept secrets. Justin slid the USB home in the desktop interface. A MAC symbol appeared on the screen, the bite from the Apple replaced by a little corner of a cartoon sun.

On the screen, his team had managed to get one of the glowing guns away from the agents and shot both. One of them rested in a slowly-spreading pool of blood, but the other just lay quietly on the ground. Justin tried not to think too hard about it.

"It's the wrong terminal," Apple eventually said. "This thing is just connected to the systems in the bunker. There must be another one around here somewhere."

Justin scanned the video cameras until he found a door that didn't seem to have any cameras behind it. "That one," he said, pointing to the screen before he realized that Apple wouldn't have any idea what he was pointing at. "There's a room that's on blackout. That might do it."

"Might as well go see," she replied.

Justin unlocked the series of doors it'd take for them to get through before he grabbed the USB and left the room.

* * *

The camera in the first room still bothered her. Caitlyn had been eyeing it through the entire fight. Well, the entire time that everyone else had been fighting. That was the thing about being a hero: it didn't automatically come with the mad skills required to be a warrior.

After twice shooting the gun Harold had given her, Caitlyn had found a little corner to duck her head in, too scared that she was going to get in the way and get someone killed.

As the fight quieted down and Paul held a gun to one of the agents, demanding the woman's sidearm and badge, Caitlyn continued to stare at the camera in the corner. She'd learned when she was having one of _those_ feelings, and that camera get her the creeps.

"There's something wrong with the camera," she told the others once they'd insisted that it was time to press on.

"What do you mean?" Harold asked, staring up at the little closed circuit camera in the corner.

"I'm not sure. Can someone reach it?"

Felix, standing resolutely tiptoed, managed to just grab the thing and pull it down.

Caitlyn took it. "We'll take a look at it later."

* * *

Justin caught up with them as they found their way to the main information center. "My turn," he said from behind everyone.

"Didn't get what you needed from the other computers? Why are these ones special?" Jeff asked.

"Because they're hooked up to the wider web. Let's just hope that everyone took our advice when she sent out the broadcasts."

Paul raised his eyebrows but didn't say anything. Jeff just looked confused. Of course, even Justin wasn't entirely sure what he was talking about. All he knew was what Apple's consciousness was telling him.

In his ear, Justin heard, "Just plug it into the console, but don't expect me to stick around after. That thing's going to wreak havoc on me."

Feeling about as badass as he could, Justin strode through the group of them to the main terminal. Justin inserted the microSD into the first slot to unlock the system followed by the sunshine USB drive. Giving the screen the finger, he yelled, "This is for Apple, you manipulative assholes."

A symbol appeared on the screen: a thick circle with a series of triangles inside and outside of it. They seemed to be both pressing in and growing out. With the appearance of the symbol that Justin didn't recognize, Paul gave him a sharp look. "When we get out of this, you and I need to have a chat, kid."

The symbol on the screen began to disintegrate as the drive, system, and everything connected to them started to corrupt.

"Now we should have whatever they have." Justin pulled the USB, and the ground beneath them began to shake.

"That's our cue," Felix yelled, and the group of them ran like hell for the front exit.

* * *

The jeep shook hard as Paul pressed his foot to the floor. It wasn't going to be enough. In the rearview mirror, he could see smoke billowing from the mountain. "Hey, does anyone know how fast lava can move?"

"About forty miles an hour," Harold replied, not missing a beat.

"How on earth do you just know that?" Caitlyn asked.

Ignoring her, Harold asked, "Why?"

"I think I can keep us going faster than that if we stay on the roads," was Paul's only reply.

Justin turned to look behind them and desperately wished that he hadn't.

A dark cloud passed over the sun, and everything went black.


	19. The Interrogation of Melanie Anne Coburg

February 25, 2013

The jeep barreled down the mountain. Close behind, a river of lava nearly kept pace.

"This is going to be a hell of a lot closer than I'm comfortable with," Harold yelled toward the front.

"Don't distract him," Felix replied. "He's doing something."

Jeff settled in for what Caitlyn could only assume was going to be a nap. That guy could sleep anywhere!

She cracked open the camera they'd taken from the hallway. Deep in the bowels, she found the source of her earlier feelings: a microSD card nestled snugly in the memory drive. She pulled it out and handed it to Justin. "I have no interest whatsoever in actually sticking this thing in my equipment. You have anything that'll read it?"

Justin took the little piece of plastic and turned it over and over. After a minute, he pulled a multi-reader from his pocket and inserted the card. "I grabbed this from Apple's shop. Figured it might come in handy if I got stuff off those computers." He plugged the thing into his cell phone.

From the front, Paul's concentration must have broken long enough for him to shout, "Later, you're going to tell me what the hell you did to this computers, right?"

Justin looked at Caitlyn and shrugged. "Like I have any idea."

They huddled over his cell phone, an earbud apiece, and watched the video that came up.

* * *

The room was the same one where the camera had been. It looked like it had been set up as an interrogation room. A shiny, metal table stood in the middle. On one side sat a black suit with dark glasses and a blank expression. On the other side, Apple had been strapped to a chair with what appeared to be some kind of intense, Tron-style handcuff thing.

The man folded his hands on the table. "Why have I brought you here?" he asked in that carefully monotonous voice that was so much more terrifying than rage could ever be.

Apple blinked owlishly at him from behind her over-large glasses. "I don't know."

The Agent allowed himself a momentary smile before he seemed to think better of the emotion and wiped his face clean. "Of course you do. You know far more than you should."

"I don't know anything."

A small tablet appeared from inside the crisp black suit, and the Agent turned his attention to it. "Melanie Anne Coburg of Polebridge, Montana." It wasn't a question. He turned to her. "You're a long way from home, young lady."

Apple smiled, a real smile. "I'm never far from home."

"Ms. Coburg," the Agent began, "we know that your friends are planning an offensive. You all may think that you're very quiet, very sneaky," he smiled at the idea, "but you're really just children playing in a world that _we_ created."

She shook her head. "You have no idea about the world you live in, Agent. There's so much more than your superiors ever let you see."

Exasperation didn't look good on the man in black. Ignoring Apple's words, he said, "I'll ask you properly, then. Your friends are planning an offensive. What are they planning."

"You know that I'm not going to tell you."

"Ms. Coburg," he said again. Each time it sounded even more condescending. "Do I really need to remind you that you are an Illegal? You are a Reality Deviant and a member of the illicit organization that calls itself the Nexplorers."

Apple didn't respond. She sat passively, unimpressed by how much information the Agent had on her.

"Ms. Coburg," it had to be an interrogation technique, "I will take no pleasure in hurting you. It's inelegant and typically ineffective, but I am willing to try if you will not tell me what you know."

"I know nothing."

The agent rose and removed his jacket but not his glasses. Beneath the coat, he wore a crisply ironed white shirt and a set of caramel leather holsters. Removing the holsters and hanging them over the back of his chair, he replied, "You are lying."

"Perhaps," she said, "but you lack the ability to drag out what I know, _Agent_."

"Of course I don't. Why else would I be in charge of interrogation?"

Apple sighed and shook her head as though tired of their childish back and forth. "You lack the awareness to know what I know. I may be a deviant in this reality, but you're hiding from it."

Two more sets of the futuristic cuffs slid out of the chair and wrapped themselves around Apple's forearms.

The agent pulled a small plastic case from a pants pocket and cracked it open to reveal a small syringe in pieces. Slowly, carefully, purposefully in Apple's view, the agent constructed the thing. "I have no interest in doing this, Ms. Coburg, but we really don't have time for anything else." He ripped open the left sleeve of her blue and white flannel shirt and injected her with something that glowed brilliantly blue.

Apple's eyes rolled back in her head and then slowly closed.

"What are your friends planning?"

"I don't know." The words barely passed through her lips as she replied.

"Do not try to lie to me. It will not work." He pulled a cell phone from the other pocket and turned on some kind of white noise. "What are your friends planning?"

"I don't know."

* * *

Justin skipped forward a few times. He was proud. Apple never cracked; she never said anything. After almost forty-five minutes, she'd been taken away by two other officers. Justin looked up and saw that Caitlyn had tears on her cheeks.

Wiping them away, she said, "We have to get her back."

He nodded, pulled the microSD card out, and shoved it into his tactical pouch. "I need to go through the information from the computers while we head back to Portland. Maybe it'll say where they took her." He hoped against hope that they'd taken her somewhere and that her body hadn't been up on that mountain.

He turned and looked back at the volcano. It gushed ash and smoke into the atmosphere. They'd need to get inside somewhere soon if they didn't want to start inhaling concrete.


	20. Just Show Me Where to Point the Gun

February 25, 2013

The sun had not yet come back. The mountain glowed hot with lava and fire.

Paul's house was little more than a pile of ash.

The Hunter Cave had been broken into, and everything was gone.

They gathered in the back room of Apple's shop, the only place they could find that was both safe and untouched.

Justin, with a kind of fury Paul had seen more than once from a hacker with a keyboard, settled himself in front of what looked like Apple's oldest computer, a blueberry iMac G3. It was her favorite.

Paul puttered around nervously as Justin typed away. Nobody could settle.

Justin muttered to himself. Felix ordered pizza (to be delivered by someone standing on the corner). Seriously, how was there still a place delivering pizza? Capitalism sure was a serious beast.

Caitlyn pulled out her camera and showed everyone the video of Apple's interrogation.

She was brave. He'd never given her enough credit for that, always just thought of her as delightfully foolhardy. How had they done it, though? Paul knew what was in the syringe. If she'd known the plans, she'd have told that agent early on, unless she'd figured out how to create partitions in her own brain. Not impossible, he figured, for someone who'd had a working USB port installed in her skull.

A second watch through the video for any information, two pizzas, and hours later, Paul heard Justin slumped back. "When we get Apple back, remind me to buy her all the coffee ever, okay?"

"What's up?" Paul asked, jogging over to the colorful Mac. He scanned the screen, taking in the information that the kid seemed to have somehow been able to hack into. What was it with hunters?

"She's in Tacoma," Justin relayed to the others. "They transferred her to some giant tech center or something up there. It's a shell corporation, I think, called Tower Corporation."

"Wait, I've heard of that," Jeff said from his napping chair in the corner.

Everyone jumped. Paul hadn't even realized the old man was awake again.

"They just bought out Pria Corp, those clean energy whosits who came in and messed up the city." Jeff nodded, crossed his arms, and headed back toward his nap.

"According to this," Justin continued, "they just bought out two different companies: Pria Corp and Leading Sun Communications. That last one owned the building before Tower Corporation took control."

It made sense, Paul considered. Leading Sun had been the home for the Guiding Hand. This must have been the next phase in development.

"So we're heading to Tacoma." Caitlyn said, giving everyone around her the death glare that only an arts student on a mission could.

"In the morning," Harold said. When Caitlyn and Justin began to protest, he put up a hand. "Nothing is more dangerous than charging in there half-rested. If we're going to do this, we're going to do it right. We're no use to her exhausted."

After some grumbling from most of the others, they came to an arrangement. Paul set his phone alarm for 4:30 AM. They would be in Tacoma by 7.

* * *

February 26, 2013

Justin felt his toes wiggling. They always did as he woke up. As he opened his eyes, still unsure whether he was awake or asleep, he saw around him seven beautiful faces.

Beauty transcends time and space, race and gender. Justin knew, without thinking about it, that these were angels. He'd dreamt of them as a child.

Their hands were soft and gentle. They touched his heart and mind and arms and legs and pressed him down into his bed on the couch for just a moment. "You have work to do, but we'll be with you."

As Justin opened his eyes, he thought he heard the echo of trumpets. They followed him into the morning.


	21. She's a MAC, and he's a PC

February 26, 2013

The car bumped and jostled them northward. Justin had a theoretical floorplan for the building based on the original plans filed with the city - who knew whether it'd been changed since then.

Paul listened to the white noise of the kid's typing threatening to put everyone to sleep. Unable to bear it any longer, he asked, "Anything I can help with?"

Justin blinked at him for a moment as if trying to understand what the question could even mean. "Um, no?" He checked back at the screen. "That is, no. I'm trying to figure out what we're walking into."

* * *

In a large, flow-through apartment in Munich, a young woman smiled, ready. "We online?"

The other two voices in her headphones responded.

"LandMind here."

"Gravmag ready to go."

A tall, bearded German man placed a cup of coffee beside her and left a kiss on her shoulder. She smiled at him, but said nothing.

"Sonnenkind here," the woman said into her headphones.

The other two voices welcomed her as they sat down to business.

* * *

"This one's yours."

Caitlyn took the little bluetooth earpiece from Justin and positioned it in her ear. "Hello?" she tested it out, feeling self-conscious.

"You ready for something awesome?" the high, lilting voice in her ear responded. She could practically see a broad smile come across the airwaves. "I'm LandMind."

"Caitlyn, er, GingerPrincess."

"A pleasure, Princess." The smile sounded bigger. "My friends and I are going to get you guys through this if it's the last thing we pull off."

Caitlyn looked up at Justin and mouthed, "Who are they?"

"Friends," he said, grinning at her. Justin reached out and handed the other earpiece to Felix. They'd decided that it seemed smartest for the people who were closest to Apple to have her friends in their ears. Technically, the three voices were there for her, not actually for the group of hunters.

"Sunny?" he asked over his headset. "Are we ready to go?"

Caitlyn watched him pause for a moment to listen to the voice in his own ear before declaring, "Then let's get this show on the road."

Up ahead, they could all see the tall, glass tower looming through the trees.

* * *

 _When we cease to dream, we cease to be ourselves._

Apple hadn't been herself for days. Somewhere deep inside her mind, she could see a little more than she had before. She understood a little more than she had before. She was more unsure than ever of what she was supposed to do.

" _Supposed_ doesn't cover half of it," her only companion, a grey tabby cat, told her. "Why does there have to be a _supposed to_? Who's choosing these rules?"

Shrugging, Apple settled herself in the never-ending expanse of white. "Do you know whether anyone's coming for me?"

The tabby cleaned one of its paws and ignored her.

"Fine then." Melanie Coburg crossed her arms and settled back. She could wait as long as it took.

* * *

The Agents were using those Mind rounds again. Paul could see the dim glow of them in the agents' hands. "Keep away from the blue rounds, okay?"

Caitlyn looked back at Paul. "I was planning to stay away from all of the bullets, thanks."

"These ones don't bother the flesh," he shot back. "Those are the same bullets they used against us in the bunker. They'll cloud your mind."

" _Your_ mind, maybe," Felix replied and grinned. "I got shot down there, remember? Made it out just fine."

Paul followed Justin's eye across the room with the three Technocrats in it. "If you get to that other computer panel, do you think you can figure out where Apple is?"

"No," Justin replied, "but I'll bet Sunny can." He tapped his earpiece. "What do you think, Sunny?" He looked back at Paul after a moment. "Worth a try."

Paul looked up at the two former soldiers. "Harold and Jeff, wait for my signal."

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and opened the Killdeer app, setting his targets as the three agents in the next room. Paul slid the phone on the ground and watched it skitter to a halt at the feet of the nearest agent. A shrill, double chirp emitted from the phone. All three agents stood transfixed, staring at the phone for the moment Paul needed. He nodded to the two others.

Harold and Jeff took point, swinging their bodies out into the room, armed with the guns they'd taken from the bunker, complete with glowing blue bullets. The two closest agents crumpled to the ground, fast asleep. Justin slipped through the newly created opening as Paul shot the third agent.

* * *

In Germany, Sunny shouted into her microphone, "Seriously, Grav! That was ridiculous. Just because we're not here for them doesn't mean we should get them killed or something!" She'd never been one for heroics.

"Oh, shut it," came the eloquent response. "Nobody caught us, and now we have three sleepy technobutts."

"Mature," LandMind replied.

Linked into the few remaining, somewhat-working cameras, Sunny watched the group make its way from the underground automatic parking lot into the first sub-basement level of the compound. Offices upstairs, R&D had to be down. "If you head left," she suggested to Interface, "you'll find your way to a second bank of computers. Plug the sunshine USB into it. My program should get me access to a few more cameras."

She watched him search the terminal for an opening and then slot the drive into place.

Data surged through her computer, nearly shorting out the backup system that'd been installed to take some of the weight out of her more-intense encounters in the Web. "Do we have that other backup? I'm gonna need it!" she yelled without looking over her shoulder.

Heller, the large German man, hefted a tower almost as big as their Irish Wolfhound over to her desk. Wordlessly, he piggybacked it into the secondary system, and Sunny breathed a sigh of relief. "You're the best," she told him and backed it up with a quick kiss. "Now, go build something wondrous while I try to keep these idiots from getting killed?"

Heller's eyebrows went up. "Which idiots? Grav and LandMind or the hunters?"

Sunny shrugged. "All of them."

He nodded and headed back to the workshop they'd installed in one corner of their apartment.

* * *

The cat pawed at Apple's side. "You might wanna think about waking up, Sleeping Beauty."

The hacker opened her eyes and looked down. "Why?"

"Because someone's coming for you."

* * *

"LandMind, do you read me?" Caitlyn yelled into her headset.

"Loud and clear, Princess, just like the last three times."

"Well, sorry for that." she shot back irritably. "I took a smack to the ear. Wasn't sure this thing was still working." Hiding under one of the white-stained, wooden desks that sat in endless rows on each level, she felt utterly useless. "Can you see what's going on with everyone?"

"I'm your eyes and ears."

Caitlyn crawled to the next desk, looking for one with a computer that was still running. They'd been heading down into the bowels of the building for over an hour, slowly making their way from level to level. However, Sunny'd told Justin that the third basement level had almost no remaining cameras that worked, which meant they'd entered the floor blind and found five angry agents with guns drawn. "What's going on?"

"Not much. Agent Craig and Agent whoever are having some kind of heart-to-heart near the old geezer. I can only get a bit of it out of Felix's earpiece."

She crawled through to the next desk, looked around the next corner, and had to stifle a scream of horror. "What the shit?!" she asked in the fiercest whisper she could manage. On the far side of the wall stood a half dozen rows of glass tanks. Most were empty, but a few held… something.

"What's going on?" LandMind asked in her ear

"They've been experimenting on something down here," she whispered to him. "I don't-" Something in one of the far tanks jolted her up to her feet, and she rushed into the area.

The light that came from the tanks throbbed a gentle yellow, not sweet like sunlight - sickly and dying. The empty tanks had nothing, just the stark whiteness of hygiene. The two in the middle, however, stood side-by-side and glowed faintly. "What happened to him."

"To whom?"

"Eric." Caitlyn placed a hand on the tank that held their former comrade. He floated a few inches off the ground in whatever aqueous solution filled the tanks. In the one beside him, she saw Chloe's body. "I don't know what they've done to them, but this is so much worse than anything I'd expected to find down here." Chloe's skin was smooth, nearly pristine, and she seemed peaceful. On the other hand, Eric's face had twisted in some kind of grimace that shouldn't have stuck around if he was, as Caitlyn theorized, in some kind of medically induced coma.

Behind her, Jeff shouted. "What the? You don't just shoot a man when he's trying to talk." It was possibly the most offended Caitlyn had ever heard Jeff manage to be, which was saying something. "That's just not on! I may not like the guy, but he deserves _some_ respect."

The sound of a silenced gun reached Caitlyn's ears.

* * *

"Don't let them out," Sunny said over the headset. The camera in Justin's phone showed the two people suspended in their glass enclosures. "All the data I got from the system suggests that he joined up with them. Your friend Eric asked for this. Also, if I'm reading everything right, the girl's dead."

On the the other channel, Grav was talking to Felix. "I can't believe the old guy shot an agent pointe-blank. How's your own cuddle-me-Technocrat?"

"Paul?" Felix asked.

"Yeah."

"That blue bullet seems to have put him asleep. I have no idea how to wake him up. Any idea what those bullets do?"

Grav'd been going through the weapons data that they'd grabbed from the computers on the first floor. "Mind rounds. The description here looks like some kind of sleeping agent. Interesting that it doesn't affect you guys."

"Comes with the territory, I guess," Felix replied offhandedly.

"Are you sure he joined up?" Harold asked, staring at Eric.

"Positive," Sunny said. "I'm looking at his intake paperwork."

"When was it?"

She scrolled back up to the top of the document. "December sixth. This says he came to the Guiding Hand as a member of the Warriors of Truth."

"I remember him talking about some group that was supposed to be around to give us help," Felix put in. "He was going on about it right before Gale showed up in the Hunter Cave."

Sunny heard their shoes on the floor as the group headed away from the tubes. She let out a long-held breath, thankful that nobody had been stupid enough to try to break the two out. "I'll forward you the data when this is all over. It's got info on Eric and his daughter Chloe both. Stuff on her doesn't look too promising. She's a labeled RD, Reality Deviant, just like he is. They're part of different research projects, though. His part looked at hunters under stress; hers focused on work with spiritual entities."

"So she never really did come back," Caitlyn said sadly.

Sunny had no idea what they were talking about.

* * *

Apple did everything she could to try to force herself back into her body. She knew it was down there, somewhere. It had to be. She remembered leaving it when they injected her again with whatever that blue stuff was. It wasn't the same as the stuff from the underground holding space.

"If I'm supposed to head back," she called to the cat, "how am I expected to do that?"

"I didn't exactly say you were going back, did I?" The cat tilted its head, halfway between interest and immense boredom.

"Then what?"

* * *

"Hook her up, Interface," Sunny called over the system. "Gale's waiting for our word."

"She kinda already looks hooked up," he responded.

The fifth and lowest floor of the building was nothing but banks and banks of computers at highly-polished desks. The floors gleamed a glossy white, and against the south wall stood a hospital bed with a figure lying on it. There was nobody else in sight.

"Where'd everyone go?" Jeff asked, looking around them. "This is way too easy."

Justin agreed but preferred not to do so out loud.

Apple lay spread across the hospital table. She looked thinner than Justin remembered. Maybe the just hadn't been feeding her properly or something. The dreadlocks around her left ear had been shaved away, and a usb cable was plugged directly into her head.

"What the heck is that?" Harold asked, pointing at the port.

"It's a usb port," Justin replied calmly. He'd seen it before. He'd even seen her plug in before to do… well, to do something. He was never quite sure. "Is it going to be safe if I disconnect her?" he asked Sunny.

"Should be. We're just going to pull her through, anyway."

Justin had no idea what that meant but trusted the voice in his head. He reached up and gently disconnected the cable from the side of her head. Apple moved ever-so-slightly.

"Hook her up, Interface. Gale can't wait forever."

He pulled the sunshine usb from his pocket and loaded Sunny's last program into Apple, who opened her eyes and blinked at him once. With a smile, she disappeared from the table, leaving nothing behind.

Jeff shouted. Felix swore and looked around; he probably thought they'd failed again. Caitlyn stood motionless. Harold furrowed his brow.

Justin cried. A voice in his head, not Sunny's, more familiar, echoed quietly, "Thank you. Keep yourself safe." His friend was gone, but she was safe.


	22. Lay Your Arms to Rest

February 26, 2013

Elevator doors split open in a seemingly-solid wall and out stepped a woman with impeccable hair and a black skirt suit. "Well, I guess that answers that question," she said. The group in front of her to turn swiftly. "I hadn't actually expected you to find her while we were putting out the fires." She paused a moment, looking them over. "Interesting."

With a stride whose intimidation factor had been perfected over years of psychological studies, Anita Palmer stepped from the elevator and walked determinedly to the group of hunters. "If you'll just come with me."

"Yeah, right!" an old man said from the back of the group. "I'm not goin' anywhere with _you_."

"I think you'll find it a preferable answer to staying down here when the cleaning procedure is activated." She smiled what she'd been told was a somewhat congenial smile and turned her back on them.

A shot rang out, quieted by the silencer, and then a bullet clattered to the ground. Without turning, she said with implied laughter, "I'd suggest you not try anything so stupid as attempting to kill me. It won't work." Ms. Palmer led them to the elevator. "I'll meet you on the top floor, then." Without waiting, she pressed one of the two buttons in the elevator. The doors closed on the confused and nearly fearful faces of five people who had thought that they'd won.

Victory, even at a cost than higher originally projected, was sweet.

* * *

The warmth that filled Caitlyn down to the tips of her fingers only intensified as they rode the elevator up. She could see a similar anticipation building in her fellows. "This is going to be okay, right?" she asked nobody in particular and received no particular answer. None of them seemed pessimistic, though.

* * *

Anita Palmer sat behind the solid oak desk that dominated the top floor office she'd taken when Tower Corp had moved into the building. The former owner wouldn't be needing it any more.

The five hunters stood awkwardly, betraying varying states of confusion and discomfort. Excellent.

"Well, I see you've decided to join me instead of being covered in whatever it is they use to sanitize those spaces."

The old man glowered petulantly but said nothing.

"Coffee? Tea? Something to eat, perhaps?" Anita gestured gracefully toward the table against the wall that sported all manner of breakfast options. "You must be famished after your great heroics."

"Ma'am," the bald man said, stepping forward, "what is it you're looking for from us?"

Anita rose and smoothed imaginary wrinkles from her wool skirt. "To be honest, you're quite fascinating." She walked over to the table the others had neglected and poured herself a cup of English Breakfast. "You and your kind have only recently arisen, and we've been quite eager to study what you're capable of. Also, you've returned dear Paul Craig to us." She added milk and lightly added, "I have plans for him."

The other shifted uncomfortably.

"We've been keeping an eye on you ever since you moved into Eric's little house." She smiled silkily at Justin. "We were quite pleased that he took possession of the home after his dear Auntie died. Such a waste, but well worthwhile if it kept you all in view."

Felix shifted from foot to foot, clenching and unclenching fists in the pockets of his jacket.

"Frankly, I'm delighted you're here." She raised the teacup as though to toast them.

* * *

Caitlyn watched the disgusting woman. She'd held her tongue as long as she could, hoping the agent would give them something worth knowing.

As she opened her mouth to speak, a sound like gently cracking ice or glass spread through the room.

Justin twitched and looked behind him.

The sound shot again, more loudly through the room.

* * *

As she opened her mouth to continue their tete-a-tete, something ripped through Anita's mind and body. She felt the teacup tumble through her fingers. Her carefully-prepared dialogue disappeared.

Something was missing...

Something had gone...

* * *

A bright, golden light surged through the building along with a third shattering sound. Justin felt something roll through him, overwhelming and intimidating. It took hold of his heart and muscles and filled them with something he'd never felt before.

The light in the building built and built until he had to close his eyes against it. Behind his closed lids, images took shape. The earth - once beautifully green and blue - spun out of the darkness. The globe was painted over with a thick, red fog that coated the entire thing, hiding it almost completely.

As he felt the warm rush of the glow, Justin watched pinpoints of light break through the fog. They penetrated that exterior, revealing first small and then larger and larger pockets of brilliance. The lights spread and joined and wove themselves together until they had obliterated the darkness.

When he opened his eyes, Justin saw the seven angels again. They stood in a circle around him and the others in the room, including the agent. Their singing rang from voices of heaven, and their smiles embodied the light that had wrapped the earth over.

"Thank you," they said, a sound like two voices perfectly entwined. "Thank you for what you have given, your help and heart and passions. Thank you for being lights in this world that has so long been denied them. Thank you for your work. Your sacrifice has been immense. Now you may rest." The angels moved among the hunters, laying gentle hands on them. "We will protect the world until it is ready."

* * *

When the light had faded away, and Caitlyn could see once more, she noticed that the female agent was nowhere to be seen. One of the windows was broken. Afraid of what she'd find outside, Caitlyn didn't bother to look.

So, they'd been tools. Whose tools? Why?

For Caitlyn, only one thing was certain. She needed a drink, and maybe breakfast.


	23. Epilogue

**Paul**

Agent Craig woke up when Felix tried to manhandle him into the back to the car. "I can take it from here, thanks," he said, and Felix nearly dropped him.

"Didn't know whether you were going to make it," Harold said as Paul put his own feet down on the ground. Paul just nodded once and looked the car over.

"Who's driving?" he asked.

* * *

He had dreams about her for months after. Paul found himself with more insomnia than he'd ever had as a child, which said something for a kid who'd been afraid of the dark. Now, though, he was never sure whether he was avoiding sleep because he'd see her or because he wouldn't want to wake up.

 _The shot hadn't made any sound as it left Agent Collins' gun. That snide asshole'd had quite the grin on his face, too._

 _Paul'd felt his eyes slide shut as the bullets overwhelmed his mind and slid him into a deep sleep._

 _As he looked around the plush armchairs and towering stacks of an immense library, Paul reflected that he shouldn't be dreaming at all. Those bullets should have put him into a dreamless coma from what he'd been able to piece together._

 _Two young girls in matching green dresses and black braided pigtails stood in front of him. They were holding hands._

 _"Oh, he's here!" one said with delight that lit up her voice but showed nowhere on her face._

 _"That's good timing," added the other._

 _"She was hoping you'd come."_

 _"Maybe she was a little worried, though."_

 _"There isn't a lot of time."_

 _"The walls are closing!" they said together and grabbed his hands._

 _As one, the girls dragged him through the rows of bookshelves to a cozy sitting area with two armchairs and a small, marble fireplace._

 _"Don't stay too long," they warned in unison and faded away._

 _Apple sat in one of the golden-yellow armchairs, smiling at him. "It's going to be okay now, you know."_

 _He walked over to her warily. "Are you real? I mean, I should be in a coma right now."_

 _"Yeah, you should, but everyone needs to dream at least a little bit." She grinned mischievously. "This is where dreams come to be born." She looked around. "Well, more like the dreams' waiting room."_

 _Paul didn't understand any of it, but she was really there in front of him. He knelt at her feet, reached out, and touched her hand, her arm, her shoulder, her face. "How are you here?"_

 _"Really? We have like three minutes and you want to know the logistics?" She laughed._

 _"Old habits die hard." He kissed each of her cheeks, her forehead, and the her lips, lightly._

 _"Gale got me out."_

 _"Where the hell has she been?! I was looking everywhere for her."_

 _"She was busy getting things ready so they could get me out of that compound, dumb-dumb."_

 _The gears turned slowly as Paul put two and two together. "So you're okay, then? You're safe? They pulled it off?" Words tumbled out of him, tripping over each other to be the first ones she heard._

 _"Yeah. They're pretty amazing, you know." Apple seemed to glow with a pride Paul didn't understand._

 _He sat back on his heels and looked up at her. "What now?"_

" _Now you go back."_

" _Why can't I come with you?"_

" _Because it's too late, Paul. It was always too late. There's no place for you over there. The trip'd rip your mind apart, no matter how much I've tried to open it." She placed her hands on his shoulders and looked down into his eyes. "I couldn't watch you be torn up like that."_

 _He didn't understand. When it came to Apple, though, Paul'd never really understood. "Will I see you again?"_

 _She shook her head. "Not really. Maybe in your dreams." She slid onto the floor and wrapped her arms around him, holding him as tightly as she could._

 _The world around them slowly ebbed away, dissipating the books and the fire and the feeling of her arms until Paul was left alone in the darkness._

 _It was the feeling of another set of arms holding him that had actually woken Paul. He'd been rather disappointed to find them attached to Felix._

* * *

 **Caitlyn**

Sitting at Sorrow Verdes, eyeing Gale angrily, Caitlyn clinked ice cubes together at the bottom of what used to be a glass of whiskey. She sat there every night, always drinking but rarely talking. At first, Gale had tried to chat with her, to get her to talk about what had happened in the glass tower. Now, Caitlyn glared at Gale, and Gale ignored her.

Sometime around midnight, Paul wandered in to join her.

"It's all gone," he said to her that night. "Every last scrap of anything they once had." Paul shook his head and paid for another pair of drinks. Caitlyn had drunk and dashed often enough that the bartender refused to open a tab for her anymore.

"Then it's over, hmm?" she asked somewhat distractedly. "Those things were right. We're done fighting."

Paul shrugged and drank his bourbon. "Maybe. I've got nothing left; you're powerless; Gale's just as bad."

Caitlyn continued to glare at the woman as though she blamed Gale for everything that had happened. "Could move away, I guess. Seattle's supposed to be nice this time of year."

Neither of them said anything. They weren't going anywhere. Neither was Gale. They'd given everything they had to the hunt and the end of the world as they'd known it. There wasn't really anything left but memories and drink and Portland.

* * *

 **Justin**

The letter came early in the fall: an offer for higher education at a well-respected university in Munich. Problem was, Justin hadn't applied. He showed the letter to Felix.

"Are you planning to accept?" Felix asked after looking the thing over and researching the university a bit to make sure it was real.

"I'm not sure. I never really thought about college. Kinda figured we were all gonna die, I guess."

Felix laughed. Justin hadn't heard him do so very much since that morning. It sounded nice, almost natural.

"You could come, too. I mean, you don't have to be here to do your work, right?" He'd thought about it. Felix had been nice to him, a real friend. They could move somewhere, be roommates, get away from everything that had happened.

"Nah." Felix shook his head. "Portland's my home. It was here when I needed it, and then I was there when it needed me. Anyway, Catherine'd freak out. Who else is supposed to reassure her that the weird shit is just weird now and not actually from the demonic depths beyond?"

With the nonchalance few felt over the violation of privacy of those they loved, Justin had hacked Felix's email a few months earlier, trying to find out anything he could about the man's relationship with the cop. To his somewhat-romanticized disappointment, he'd found nothing beyond friendship and awkward meetings for coffee that ended in Catherine trying to get more information out of Felix (via later emails) than Felix had ever had to give.

Justin made the decision a few weeks later when Bank of America officially realized that Eric's house (the Hunter Cave) was now without owner and without heir. After packing up the clothes he had and a few choice goodies from Felix that just happened to still be lying around the little house, Justin boarded an airplane to Germany.

A small, finely-boned woman, along with her giant German boyfriend and their Irish wolfhound, met him at the arrivals gate. She had a hair of thick headphones around her neck and wore a faded 1UP mushroom t-shirt.

"Glad you could make it, Interface," Sunny said as she slapped him gently on the shoulder. A small sun tattoo peaked through the hair on her forehead.

He added things up and laughed. "You sent the letter, didn't you?"

"I was kind of disappointed you didn't call ahead. What, d'ja forget where I live?"

Justin shook his head. "I wasn't sure you two were even around anymore after what happened to Apple."

They walked out onto the sidewalk there Sunny hailed a car.

"To be honest, that choice - whatever it really was - just wasn't for us. We belong in _this_ world."

As they climbed into the black car driven by a woman who could be the big guy's twin, Justin asked, "So what am I doing here?"

Sunny smiled brilliantly. "Getting us back online!"

The car started, and they pulled away from the curb. Justin couldn't stop grinning.

* * *

A lot of people didn't really notice the end of the world. You really only recognize what's happened when it's _your_ world ending. Weird murders went down, but the ozone was still a problem. Mages the world over found themselves unable to make the miraculous alterations to reality they once had. Some went on with their lives; others didn't. HunterNet went down, but then someone on the East Coast who'd had a mirror site or just a lot of backups had started up a facsimile of it. It gathered new users with new stories and new evidence of the strange and unpredictable in the world. Sometimes, Justin sent the site's webmaster photos from Germany; sometimes, she emailed him back and signed everything with a smiley face.

Some people deal with the end of their worlds better than others do. It's a hard part of living, but it's a part. ChopChop lived out the rest of her life in Canada with her grandson. Catherine eventually got married; Felix was one of her bridesmen. Caitlyn and Paul and Gale struggled to deal with what they'd lost. Eventually, they managed to pull lives together and move on, but never completely. Jeff passed away a few years later, and Harold spoke at the funeral. Lives went on.

Sometimes, Justin and Sunny stood on top of the old warehouse she lived in and poured out sips of apple cider in memory of friends lost as the sun set over the rooftops of Munich.

"You know," Sunny told him one night, "my friend Naomi always says that people don't really die if there's someone left to remember them."

Justin nodded and stared into the distance. "How do you make sure their stories are remembered, then?"

Sunny shrugged. "Heck if I know."

Heller walked up behind them with two more cold bottles in one hand and an iPad in the other. "Well, you could try writing them down."

Justin smiled.


End file.
